Climate hypochondria and tribalism vs. ‘winning’

I’m starting this post while sitting in the Phoenix airport waiting for my delayed flight home (by the time I get home, I will have been up for 24 hours today/tomorrow).

Sometimes I wonder why I bother.

Well, maybe tomorrow I will remember. The response to my testimony has been gratifying, from people across the political spectrum.

And the response from some segments has been very illuminating. Sometimes I think these people don’t really want to make progress in addressing climate change, but rather are using the issue as a club to enforce their tribalism and/or achieve social justice objectives. I think they actually LIKE the gridlock and climate wars.

Climate hypochondria

First, the climate hypochondriacs. Some people (including one of the Members) took issue with the following statement in my testimony:

“Based upon our current assessment of the science, the threat does not seem to be an existential one on the time scale of the 21st century, even in its most alarming incarnation.”

I referred to AR5 WGII:

“Every single catastrophic scenario considered by the IPCC AR5 (WGII, Table 12.4) has a rating of very unlikely or exceptionally unlikely and/or has low confidence. The only tipping point that the IPCC considers likely in the 21st century is disappearance of Arctic summer sea ice (which is fairly reversible, since sea ice freezes every winter).”

In hindsight, I should have hit this a bit harder. See my previous posts:

The IPCC AR5 refers to ‘reasons for concern.’ I won’t rehash my previous posts here, take a look.

Thinking that catastrophes like major hurricane landfalls, massive forest fires etc. will be ‘cured’ by eliminating fossil fuel emissions is laughable. Well its not really funny. Thinking that eliminating fossil fuel emissions will ‘solve’ the problem of extreme weather events is very sad, sort of on the level of doing rain dances. Every thing that goes wrong, they blame on fossil fuel driven climate change.

Imagine how surprised they would be if we were ever to be successful at eliminating fossil fuel emissions, and then we still had bad weather!

Tribalism

The response on twitter to my testimony from the usual suspects (e.g. Michael Mann, Dana Nuccitelli, Bob Ward and their acolytes) has been entertaining. Its actually a waste of space to reproduce any of it here, check it out on twitter if you have the stomach.

Of course they loved Kim Cobb’s testimony and thought mine was horrible, in spite of the fact that we said comparable things about climate policy.

Kim Cobb’s testimony

In 2003 or so, I hired Kim Cobb at Georgia Tech. During my later years at Georgia Tech, we disagreed on ALOT of things.

She genuinely wants climate solutions, and is prepared to work with energy companies and Republicans. VERY FEW climate scientists do this.

Here is excerpt from the first paragraph of her written testimony:

“My message today is simple: there are many no-regrets, win-win actions to reduce the growing costs of climate change, but we’re going to have to come together to form new alliances, in our home communities, across our states, and yes, even in Washington. There are plenty of prizes for early, meaningful action. These include cleaner air and water, healthier, more resilient communities, a competitive edge in the low-carbon 21st century global economy, and the mantle of global leadership on the challenge of our time. I’m confident that through respectful discourse, we will recognize that our shared values unite us in seeking a better tomorrow for all Americans.”

She discusses adaptation, innovation, energy efficiency, land use practices, as well as CO2 emissions reductions.

Compare her recommendations with my closing recommendation (slightly modified on the fly, from what was given in my previous post):

“Bipartisan support seems feasible for pragmatic efforts to accelerate energy innovation, build resilience to extreme weather events, pursue no regrets pollution reduction measures, and land use practices. Each of these efforts has justifications independent of their benefits for climate mitigation and adaptation. These efforts provide the basis of a climate policy that addresses both near-term economic and social justice concerns, and also the longer-term goals of mitigation.”

Is it just me, or is there common ground here?

The no-regrets angle is key here. Richard Lindzen reminded me that ‘no-regrets’ used to be the appropriate framework for climate policy:

By insisting on fighting the climate science wars in an attempt to win a climate policy debate, climate scientists continue to set this up for failure. From the Hartwell Paper:

“it is not just that science does not dictate climate policy; it is that climate policy alone does not dictate environmental or development or energy policies.”

By ostracizing any climate scientists who engage with energy companies or Republicans, and pretending that that energy policy depends on 100% scientific consensus in a speaking consensus to power framework, these climate scientists are setting climate policy up for failure.

Speaking of energy companies, I’m relieved that this issue did not come up in the Hearing, after the Grijalva inquisition of a few years ago. By the way, Kim Cobb holds the Georgia Power Chair at Georgia Tech. The activists presumably think that is fine; its only bad when someone like me engages with energy companies. Can anyone think of why energy companies should not have access to the best climate information available and advice from climate scientists?

Winning

Climate scientist/activists need to recognize that any U.S. climate policy will require bipartisan support (that includes the dreaded Republicans). Also, energy companies are part of the solution. Attacking scientists such as myself and other climate scientists that testify for the Republicans is pointless.

No-regrets, win-win solutions seem politically palatable to the Republicans; it remains to be seen if Democrats will make incremental no-regrets policies such as proposed here the enemy of their grandiose ideas such as Green New Deal.

391 responses to “Climate hypochondria and tribalism vs. ‘winning’”

Bless you, Judith. Your testimony was telling. I do wish you might have mentioned the natural experiment 1929-1931, when human CO2 production went down 30%, CO2 stabilized, and temps kept rising to 1941…

Eric: It is fairly trivial to calculate that a radiative imbalance of +1 W/m2 is capable of warming a 50 m mixed layer of ocean over 70% of the surface (plus the atmosphere) at an INITIAL rate of 0.2 K/yr assuming none of that heat reaches the ocean below the mixed layer. (The mixed layer is the physically mixed portion of the ocean that changes temperature with the seasons, ie within six months).

However, once the surface and atmosphere starts to warm, it begins to emit more LWR to space and perhaps reflect more or less SWR back to space. This concept is known as the climate feedback parameter (W/m2/K) and is inversely linked to ECS (K/doubling). A climate feedback parameter of 1, 2 or 3 W/m2/K is an ECS of 3.6, 1.8 or 1.2 K/doubling. (The math of this is also worth understanding.) If ECS is 3.6 K/doubling, then a 1 W/m2 forcing will result in equilibrium warming of about 1 K, and would be reached in about 5 years at an initial rate of 0.2 K/yr. However, after 2.5 years and 0.5 degK of warming, the radiative imbalance would be reduced by warming from 1 W/m2 to 0.5 W/m2, and the rate of approach to equilibrium would be cut in half. Nevertheless, within about a decade, the mixed layer will be approaching equilibrium warming of 1 degK. If ECS is 1.8 or 1.2 K/doubling, the approach to equilibrium will be 2- or 3-fold faster. So one answer to your question is that it takes about a decade of less for rising CO2 to have the majority of its effect on temperature.

The above paragraph assumes that none of the heat from a radiative imbalance penetrates the deep ocean, which isn’t true on for periods longer than a season. Right now we have a radiative forcing of about 2.5 W/m2, but a radiative imbalance of about 0.7 W/m2, meaning that 70% of current forcing has been negated by the increased radiative cooling to space. The 1 K of warming we have experience is emitting or reflecting an addition 1.8 W/m2 more, consistent with energy balance models showing ECS in the vicinity of 1.8 K/doubling. Radiative forcing has been increasing at a rate of about 0.4 W/m2/decade, and our radiative imbalance is about two decades behind radiative forcing because of the heat penetrating below the mixed layer. Since so much heat if going into the deep ocean, we might say it is taking about two decades for rising CO2 to have most of its effect.

jimm-jimm (ww-ww), you keep on presenting this erroneous fact of the matter. Carbon growth continued its usual 3ppm rise in the 1930s. It did not stabilize until the 1940s, a decade after your fabled experiment. Dr Curry actually has a better graph than this one that shows concentrations going all the way back to the turn of the century. (she knows full well about the stabilization of the 40s) If i can find it, i’ll post it…

So, you’re proposing that the Law Dome record is appropriate for the globe, and that the 30% decrease in human CO2 production had no effect on the atmospheric content, but that during the WWII years and following, CO2 did stabilize for an unknown reason, and temperatures sank at that point?
Are you serious?

Well, maybe tomorrow I will remember. The response to my testimony has been gratifying, from people across the political spectrum.”
Judith- as a scientist and a student of the world, i hope that someday i will get the opportunity to meet you in person and shake your hand. PLEASE DO NOT STOP! We need people with wisdom and intelligence (not always the same thing) to continue to work towards sanity in this often polarized and insane world. Thanks from all of us who wish the world to be better, but carefully, and in what will hopefully be the optimal manner- everyone working together not because we are forced to, but because we perceive it as being in our own interests.

I am just a humble but interested visitor to Judith’ s site . I have to say that I wish also to second the words of Barry Newman (above). Thank you Judith for all your intelligent and honest contributions to the scientific debate that is climate change.

Dr. Curry, don’t you dare stop! Yes, the odds seem to be stacked against those who wish to bring science and clarity to this discussion, but you must not give up. Make no mistake: your words and the objective way you present the science is influencing many people, including young minds. Your efforts are appreciated, perhaps more than you know. Heartfelt thanks.

One would think that nuclear power would be a hot topic and scientists would do their best to promote deployment and further research, and to dispel the superstition related to radiation. But it appears to be taboo, whilst things like wind farms and solar power are getting the attention instead, stuff that requires a lot of space. The irony is that it’s humankind’s land use that is the greatest threat to nature. We’ve converted half of the Earth’s land, the most fertile half, into fields, pasture or industry, and the solutions offered to fix problems really related such change but misattributed to CO2 emissions often involve the use even more land.

One political tribe has fought against nuclear power for four decades, publicly and enthusiastically and continues to do so. They are no more likely to do a 180 on the topic than they are to drop the idea that taxes should be higher. This is the tribe that climate activists have hitched their wagon to and the reason for gridlock.

It’s time for a IPCC review of alternatives technology and an SPM. That won’t happen because one tribe understands how that will turn out.

Both political tribes cannot have the IPCC say they have been wrong for 40 years, both face that today- the right in declaring global warming isn’t serious and left in declaring their policies aren’t serious. The fact is that even though the right is wrong, the left has to admit it was wrong for anything to be done. And that won’t happen. And therefore, we have hearings on climate models and not solutions.

The reason nuclear power became so expensive was the fear-mongering against it combined with bureaucrats requiring not just belts plus suspenders but uplifting balloons and castle walls! Next generation buried modular failsafe nuclear would be much cheaper.

Yeah those bureaucrats and their insistence on things like secure backup power supplies and hydrogen recombiners which would have come in handy in Japan. Or a reactor core cooling turbine, which I believe was also missing from the TEPCO plants.

It’s kinda like you have to force the Nuclear Plant Operators to protect them from themselves.

There is a reason that the “more expensive,” emissions-free nuclear power went from zero to 20% of US electricity production in 20 years and 80% in France and cost-conscious communist countries did it where they needed power as well.

Let’s see if you’re willing to acknowledge why that happened.

If an IPCC working group on technology put out a review on alternatives that promoted nuclear power, the Greens would instantly be the deniers. And that’s why nobody reviews technology for a technological problem.
Meanwhile, we have NPR promoting “The Green New Deal” – which no intelligent life form considers a serious climate policy, but many believe is great fun politics and social justice virtue signaling.

It is true that nuclear is expensive, and nuclear fear has slowed research, possibly by decades. One should think that the CO2 scare would boost deployment and research, but if many scientists are not even willing to discuss it as a possible solution, can we trust these scientists? Naively I once (several years ago) brought up the nuclear question on realclimate, and the post was immediately sent to the borehole.

What the world needs is cheap energy, which would set of a chain reaction of problem solving. Cheap, abundant energy would greatly help to eliminate poverty, which in turn would stop population growth, and in turn put less pressure on nature. Cheap energy is such a powerful tool to help solve many problems.

It’s technically very difficult to make nuclear power this cheap energy source, but I think we should trust that it is possible. Wouldn’t it be better if we simply forget about climate and just focus on a common goal of getting cheaper energy than fossil fuel can ever be, and simply acknowledge that fossil fuel despite its problems has been and still is a necessary step towards that goal? Fossil fuel would become obsolete simply as a side effect.

Nuclear power is uncompetitive because too much steel/concrete/stuff is subject to vast overregulation (more accurately, administrative rules) largely due to the fact the fuel can melt and release vast amounts of radiation.
Economic solution for nuclear power is straightforward: passively fail-safe, efficient designs that can be built reasonably quickly using less stuff subject to far fewer rules. This approach does not require changing existing regulations – Code of Federal Regulations.
There are advanced nuclear designs following this simple approach.

Bobdroege
If you tie everything up in excessive regulations, the cost dramatically balloons but worse, actual safety suffers because limited resources are squandered on dumb stuff. That is a part of the competitiveness problem of conventional nuclear plants.
The other problem lies with the active measures to prevent the core from melting and spewing radiation into the environment. The cost for these measures makes new conventional nuclear plants simply too risky to build from a financial standpoint. The only way to reduce that risk is thru passive designs, which is a key element of advanced reactors.
Your assumption that forgings create the bottleneck for future reactors is incorrect for most advanced reactors, which generally can use rolled plate.
The actual impediment to the deployment of advanced reactors is oddly the Department of Energy. Their efforts are primarily concentrated on themselves and squandering resources on multiple exotic reactor designs with little chance of beating combined-cycle natural gas plants.
Your bottom-line assessment is likely accurate in terms of decades into the future for new reactors but the timeline is not related to the manufacturing of reactor vessels.

Fundamentally, the DOE is made up of PHD’s with little commercial experience. With that kind of background, the DOE gravitates towards university research type projects that go on forever, with the idea of actually making money selling power an irrelevant concept.
Worse yet, DOE activities are a classic “pay-to-play” exercise and somewhat of an extortion racket. If you do not use DOE resources, you generally will not get any help. Pretty much a the Washington Swamp at its finest.
The Chinese and Russians are the world leaders in nuclear power and we have the DOE to thank for that dismal state of affairs, with a solid assist from the Nuclear Regulatory Commision. As Trump would say: “Sad, very sad”.

that’s a useful reminder, but given that the latest version of the former’s utopia – the green new deal – is said by its author to be a direct assault on Nuclear power as well, I think one must recall that the latter industrial concerns are generally steered by the mass hysteria around them rather than the vice versa. Of course they rent seek around the edges like the next guy, but as far as leading you’re right – fuggehedaboudit. We’d be more likely to end of with miniature nukes in the basement of a few folks who realize if any of this comes true it will be smarter to be off the grid than on.

Navy reactors are not efficient, around 25% and are not designed to compete with commercial power plants. They are designed to avoid constantly taking on fuel while conducting military operations. Navy reactors are, thankfully, also not subject to massive overregulation

I guess that depends on what you want to be efficient with. A Navy nuke plant in a small area of an aircraft carrier hull powers a medium sized city 24/7.
Meanwhile you could, if it’s not raining, make a cup of coffee for a medium city using a few square miles of solar panels. But only at mid-afternoon.

One of the arguments against nukes is that we’ve lost all the people who know how to design and operate the plants. I’m betting the folks who can fit one into a submarine have the capacity to fit one into New York City. I could be wrong.

In FY 2017, the Congressional Budget Office reported spending of $590 billion for defense, about 15% of the federal budget. For the FY 2019 [teh Donald] proposed an increase to the military to $686.1 billion.

I do not follow your reference to the DOD budget – the cost of a navy reactor is spread out over years and is in any case not a specific line item, besides also being classified as Top Secret (or maybe higher)
Small machines invariably have higher unit production cost (includes fuel, debt repayment, profit, etc) than larger machines. Classic economies-of-scale.
As small hamlet cannot afford a small reactor. Somebody has to subsidize the enterprise.

“Take, for instance, what the paper describes as the largest subsidy to the energy industry – roads. In the author’s view, roads are a government subsidy to private transport, therefore a subsidy to petrol, therefore a subsidy to fossil fuels…

Never mind buses use roads too, or bike lanes are being built into roads across the country – two climate-friendly modes of transport which would struggle without roads.

But, on the facts, this subsidy claim is wrong. The Department of Infrastructure’s own figures show the money raised by road and vehicle-specific taxes ($16.2 billion in 2006-07) is much more than is spent by all levels of government on roads ($12.1 billion the same year).

Anyway, it’s hardly reasonable to describe government investment in roads as a direct subsidy to the energy industry. Unless you are happy to describe government investment in health as a subsidy to the pharmaceutical industry. Or government investment in schools as a subsidy to the whiteboard industry…

“To provide electricity in today’s world, an ‘advanced reactor’ must improve over existing reactors in the following 4-core objectives. It must produce significantly less costly, cost-competitive clean electricity, be safer, produce significantly less waste and reduce proliferation risk. It is not sufficient to excel at one without regard to the others.” Dr. Christina Back, Vice President, Nuclear Technologies and Materials for General Atomics, May 2016 testimony before the US Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee hearing on the status of advanced nuclear technologies.

The solar and battery vs nuclear has assumptions like how long can the batteries last when an extended event happens. I did not read carefully but it looked like on first glance that they are assuming that the batteries get charged every day.

We’ll believe that when we see the first country generating electricity from intermittent renewables plus batteries alone. Like Germany or Australia for instance. They’ve talked the talk now let them walk the walk.

The sort of batteries needed for grid storage will concentrate a huge amount of energy in many distributed places. That always means risk. Like risk from nuclear. Although I guess there’s good risk and bad risk – left wing risk and right wing risk.

Paul Homewood has a good analysis showing that Britain’s new massive offshore wind farm will cost 3 times market per MwH. And that’s not including batteries I believe. I don’t know where these numbers come from Bob, but if they were true every utility in the country would be rushing to solar and wind. Generally utility companies are publicly owned and generally try to find the least expensive and most reliable sources of power.

“Wind turbines have cropped up like dandelions across large areas of the United States, and thousands more are coming. The US Department of Energy projects that we’ll have 404 gigawatts of wind energy capacity across the country by 2050, up from 89 GW today. Since overall electricity demand is expected to hold steady, that would fulfill more than one-third of the country’s needs.”

Well Bob, these figures are misleading because they don’t include costs for levalizing intermittency. Those costs an be quite high, since the backup plants will be idle a significant percentage of the time.

“Costs not captured include electrical grid upgrade, connectivity of renewables and buffering of their intermittency by rapid cycling of fossil fuel plants as presently practiced in this country, and non-carbon-tax externalities such as pollution and health care costs associated with energy sources, especially for coal.”

Well Bob, If you look at wind power actual output in England for example you will see that there are months where you would need the fossil fuel backup almost all the time. Costs to build a fossil fuel plant are not small. Let’s say it runs perhaps 50% of the time. That’s still a hefty fuel bill. Probably gas is the preferred fuel for such a plant. If its coal, there is a real problem with startup time.

Wind is also really only a good option in the high plains in the US where the wind blows much of the time. The cost of transmission infrastructure is not included in your estimates either and could be a very big cost if you need to get the power to the East coast for example.

Bottom line, the numbers you cite are not realistic. It’s an obvious point and it surprises me how many people continue to cite these misleading numbers.

Perhaps a more feasible option is to use pumped hydro storage for wind and solar. That could start up very quickly and could use the same transmission network the wind or solar uses. On the high plains though that’s a big challenge though and the reservoirs might need to be hundreds of miles away.

Judy:
I watched most of the first and second panels today. You handled yourself well. I was dismayed by the lack or misrepresentation of facts. Tribalism is a good way of describing the performances of most of those involved. I was astonished by the failure of either side to ask you a decent question and when they did, e.g., the importance of land use, they never let you answer it.
My summary: It was like doing an amazing magic show for an audience of the blind. The fact that the Chairman failed to thank you was appalling. I hope that the Ranking Member was more courteous.

I have only read your posted testimony.
Great with the exception of the antifragility and thrivability stuff. Would like to hear of any real world example of application to climate policy aside from trivial ones (that what every reasonable person does anyway).
But probably nice hallucinogens for intellectuals.

No regrets policies might mean different things to real scientists/economists (CO2/GDP, the “good”) and politicians (votes) or media people (clicks) or career scientists (approval by the “right” people to advance career). May everyone is already pursuing his/her personal no regrets policy.

i’m not saying i favor this or not, but suppose there were a massive gas tax increase to pay for replace failing transportation infrastructure (not for mass transit or high speed rail which are largely tortured instantiations of what americans would do, but americans like roads)? that is argment that could be made pretty much independent of climate although it would result in some shifting to alternative or high mileage vehicles and probably relatively little diminishment in vehicle miles travel (maybe in fact the opposite).

In Michael Crichton “State of fear” published in 2004 he ends in his author’s message with ” We desperately need a nonpartisan, blinded funding mechanism to conduct research to determine appropriate policy”. This among many other worthwhile recommendations is 15 years old by now. It reminds me of the adage: “The only thing that we learn from history is that we learn nothing from history”. I am a strong supporter of Judith Curry and admire her knowledge and perseverance.

“Sometimes I think these people don’t really want to make progress in addressing climate change, but rather are using the issue as a club to enforce their tribalism and/or achieve social justice objectives…”

Indeed. The primary issue in the domain is social, long since divorced from what’s happening regarding the physical climate, whether that turns out to be good, bad, or indifferent. There is a culture based on climate catastrophism. Cultures reinforce their in-group, and in doing so create an out-group that has to be constantly beaten back, plus…

“…and/or achieve social justice objectives.”

find cultural allies / allied causes, to strengthen the in-group’s position in the wider world, and…

“I think they actually LIKE the gridlock and climate wars…”

…create social reward and emotional satisfaction for those who maintain / push the cultural boundary on behalf of the in-group.

Any serious progress on the purported problem would remove the group’s main reason for existence, hence via deeply embedded and subconscious mechanisms the group promotes emergent and effortful solutions that will *not* solve the problem. Virtue signalling efforts are ideal in this respect, as they maximally advertise group loyalty yet minimally contribute to a solution that threatens group existence.

“Based upon our current assessment of the science, the threat does not seem to be an existential one on the time scale of the 21st century, even in its most alarming incarnation.”

Cultures feature a socially enforced consensus that is represented by a core ‘umbrella’ narrative (with a fleet of sub-narratives beneath). The existential is the absolute core of this narrative for climate culture, which was triggered by science but doesn’t come from science; it is emergent via emotive selection. Notwithstanding that mainstream science doesn’t support the narrative, i.e. even without any reference to skeptical science, the existential is the critical essence of this culture if you will, which therefore cannot be relinquished by committed adherents come what come may. Culture subverts reason, so the belief in an near-term existential threat is not a reasoning thing.

This is not just one way. In places like the US, the cultural conflict aligns to much older political boundaries, so there is culture on both sides. Even in places where such alignment hasn’t happened, there is mass resistance via innate skepticism, an instinctive reaction to over-dominant or alien culture, which is nevertheless not based on reason either.

‘Sometimes I wonder why I bother.’

Notwithstanding that per above culture subverts reason, it’s also the case that reason short-circuits culture. I guess this is the real battle, and one in which you are making serious contributions at the highest level. If reason prevailed, the common ground of no regrets policies would be obvious. But these are becoming associated with out-group status, or at least dubious loyalty; they don’t provide the necessary platform to signal zeal and a strong opposition to the enemy. Plus they undermine the very ‘purpose’ of the group, which is only its own existence. Cultural mechanics are blind, they acquire new members and defend boundaries at any cost, which costs include an enemy for every friend, increased social polarization, and the collateral damage of all the implemented policies that go wrong or waste resources due to a serious disconnect between cultural vision and reality.

Andy, this is the crux of the matter, the reason why we can’t have evidence-based discussions and develop sensible and rational policies. I’ve copied it on my Facebook page, although I think that most of my FB friends around the globe glaze over when I address this topic. Australia is perhaps shooting itself in the foot more than any other country, a judge recently knocked back an application for a (steel-making) coalmine because we must do everything we can to restrict CO2 emissions. Never mind that coal is our biggest export earner and our best source of reliable, dispatchable power given state restrictions on gas exploration and extraction and a refusal to consider nuclear power, for which we have one-third of the world’s fuel.

Thanks, Faustino. In recent years the strength of cultural conflict seems to be overtaking even the US, although it doesn’t seem to align so neatly to pre-existing political lines. My knowledge of Ozzie politics is not good, but the issue seems to have been trashing leaders and parties and reputations one way or another for some time, yet its true nature is still not recognised.

Tribalism and the need to win at all cost detracts from the scientific norms of objectivity and circumspection. Also forgotten has been that science evolves and new evidence should always be considered and given a fair hearing. That is made more difficult when the mindset is so locked into a position, more on emotion than facts. Recently much has been made of the threat from Antarctica’s marine ice-cliff instability and apocalyptic predictions of massive SLR.
And yet a brand new paper questions those findings
“We conclude that previous interpretations of these MICI projections over-estimate sea-level rise this century; because the MICI hypothesis is not well constrained, confidence in projections with MICI would require a greater range of observationally constrained models of ice-shelf vulnerability and ice-cliff collapse.”

This doesn’t prove or disprove anything, other than there are differing findings, a never ending stream of new evidence and a diversity of opinions.

While we are talking about climate here, I believe the above has resulted in the carry over known as ‘Trump Derangement Syndrome’. The way things are going, some appear headed towards Derangement Syndrome in general. Hard to hold bipartisan negotiations with such people.

“……….there are many no-regrets, win-win actions to reduce the growing costs of climate change…..”

I would like to understand what, precisely, these “no regret, win-win actions” are.

It seems to that, in life, as in physics every action has an equal and opposite reaction. Perhaps in this case not entirely opposite but, for example, if every person on the planet were to convert to veganism and ride bicycles, what would the consequence to society and the planet be?

Are wind turbines, PV’s and EV’s considered no-regret win-win’s when we are aware of the gargantuan land and offshore area required for turbines, and the enormous amounts of precious metals needed for PV’s and EV’s.

What would be the impact on for example, the pharmaceutical/plastics/semi conductor industries were the use of crude oil rendered unnecessary for transport, industrial, and domestic use? Increased cost perhaps?

What about plastic packaging, what impact would there be on timber resources were we all to use paper/cardboard to encase everything?

The term “no-regrets, win-win actions” may perhaps become the next chant of the climate faithful and yet it seems to me there is no such thing. I do, however, stand to be corrected.

“I would like to understand what, precisely, these “no regret, win-win actions” are.”

I took advantage of government subsidies for a smart thermometer and new windows. I was paid half back for the thermometer and $500 per window for 10 windows. My energy bill is noticeably smaller.

There are a lot of people out there with drafty houses, old furnaces and air conditioners (to name a few of the top energy wasters). (Financially) helping these people upgrade I believe qualifies for ‘no regrets’ and it’s certainly benn a win for me.

Dr. Currie,
Just listened to the entire committee hearing.
1) I agree with you entirely that this is a regional and bottom up problem.
Ms. Jeampierre seemed to agree with you there.
2) Looks like some are exploiting your pragmatism to prove their own points.
3) One rep seemed to think Cox a scientist and you not. Odd.
4) Mixing pollution with climate. That’s ok with me. If climate solutions reduce pollution, I support them.
5) Mixing biodiversity with climate. That’s ok with me. I am worried about biodiversity.
6) Odds and ends:
a) Federal land/sea use seems to be a sensitive topic. “Hypocritical” says Rep. Bishop.
b) I’m not sure what the Louisiana Congressman was trying to get at in terms of energy use in Massachusetts.
c) Interesting North Carolina’s wood chips being used in EU (I’m in the Netherlands. Government is kicking and screaming about meeting the Paris climate goals.)
d) Interesting diversity of panelists and congresspeople.

My 2 cents: Global warming is occurring but the rate of change is not at the level of emergency as an asteroid hitting the earth. Governors and state legislators probably know better what is at stake in their own states. Maybe the Federal government should stay out. Or as one person said, at least help make the transition smoother. (I think this was DiPerna’s point.) This can be called pragmatic or a delaying tactic.

So how about a 21.5 year trend? Since 1997.5 the rate of warming has been decelerating. In fact you can make it 25 years. You can go to 1994 and the rate to 2018 is still decreasing.

Let’s see, the theory says that the more CO2 we add the more slowly it warms, right? Until it stops warming and then we can add CO2 without producing warming, is that right? Because that is what it has happened for the past 20+ years.

so no you can’t say it’s cooling.

Of course I can say it’s cooling, if the data says the temperature has decreased more than the uncertainty in the measurement. Don’t be silly. What are you? A reality denier? Are we only allowed to say it’s warming?

… Let’s see, the theory says that the more CO2 we add the more slowly it warms, right? Until it stops warming and then we can add CO2 without producing warming, is that right? Because that is what it has happened for the past 20+ years. …

Simplistic nonsense that is not, how do they say it, even wrong. It borders on being an outright denial of natural variability.

The GMST is a tiny percentage of an earth system that has warmed almost continuously (only visible dip here is the multi-year La Niña that started in 1999):

If we have trouble measuring global surface temperature in which we live, are adapted and have instruments for hundreds of years, imaging measuring the ocean’s temperature, that changes a minimal part of the surface temperature, and thus requires a higher precision. Then displaying it in huge numbers of small units of energy, because temperature looks ridiculous. And the ocean is so much larger than the surface that we would require what, 10,000 times more instruments? 100,000 times more?

Ocean Heat Content is all fantasy. It means what they want it to mean.

I see you have trouble distinguishing between temperature, its first derivative, and its second derivative.

If you want to know if global warming has been accelerating or decelerating since 1997 you need to look at the second derivative which is the one that measures acceleration. The first derivative (the trends you calculate) will not give you that information.

If you calculate the temperature rate of change over time, its trend will tell you if global warming is accelerating or not. The answer is that since 1997 it is decelerating.

I understand it alright, you don’t have any statistical significance in the measurement of the acceleration of the temperature series to justify saying that temperature is decelerating.

Then what you don’t understand is the meaning of statistical significance.

The deceleration in global warming since 1997 has taken place. It is in the data. No statistical analysis can say that it hasn’t taken place. What statistics says is that there is insufficient data to rule out that the deceleration observed is due to chance. It cannot say that what is real (has been measured) is not real. Only if the observation was within measurement uncertainty we could not know if it was real or not. But measurement uncertainty is only ±0.1°C, and the change has been much bigger. So it is real.

And I don’t care if the deceleration in global warming it is due to chance or not, what it is clear is that it is not due to the increase in CO2.

There are hundreds of articles and thousands of scientists attesting to the global warming deceleration since 1997. It is clear that you don’t know what you talk about.

Statistics is not an arbiter of what is real or what is not. It is a tool to see if you can rule chance as the cause of an observation or not, and even if you cannot rule out chance, it doesn’t mean that it is due to chance. You simply might have insufficient data. Something that is not statistically significant might still be real and not due to chance.

Finally Javier, you have something exactly right, that you do not have sufficient data to support your claims.

The lack of statistical significance also means you can not rule out the possibility that warming is continuing at the previous rate.

And another ******* thing, you are taking derivatives with respect to time!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Temperature is not determined by time.

That’s a big MK48 torpedo to your claims.

Another thing is that a second order polynomial can’t model temperature as temperature is bounded for sure on the low end and probably on the high side as well, where a second order polynomial is not bounded.

Finally Javier, you have something exactly right, that you do not have sufficient data to support your claims.

You wish.

The lack of statistical significance also means you can not rule out the possibility that warming is continuing at the previous rate.

How could it be continuing warming at the previous rate if it is measured not to? You live in la-la-land. Statistics cannot deny the data.

you are taking derivatives with respect to time. Temperature is not determined by time. That’s a big MK48 torpedo to your claims.

Rate of warming is dependent on time by definition. Is the amount of temperature change over time. It is therefore adequate to take derivatives over time to calculate it. Sorry, no torpedos.

Another thing is that a second order polynomial can’t model temperature as temperature is bounded for sure on the low end and probably on the high side as well, where a second order polynomial is not bounded.

The second order polynomial is not a model but a regression of the data to a curve that provides a fit. It cannot be extrapolated. Your idea that a fit should model temperature is funny.

Let’s see. My claims are:
1. The rate of warming has been decreasing since 1997.
There is huge amount of scientific literature supporting it. It is even called the pause. So you are denying science by saying that it has not happened.
2. The rate has turned negative recently.
Temperature has decreased since 2016.2. For temperature to decrease the rate of warming MUST be negative.

So you are making a fool of yourself by attacking such solid claims so well supported in the scientific literature and reality.

1. The rate of warming has been decreasing since 1997.
There is huge amount of scientific literature supporting it. It is even called the pause. So you are denying science by saying that it has not happened.

I already showed this to be false in a previous post, the rate of warming has been variable since 1997.

2. The rate has turned negative recently.
Temperature has decreased since 2016.2. For temperature to decrease the rate of warming MUST be negative.

The rate since 2016.2 by HADCRUT4 is -0.966 +/- 1.382, so the uncertainty in that measurement means you can not be sure that the trend is negative.

Your are looking at natural variability in ENSO, El Nino years are warmer, La Nina are cooler. Picking a period from a El Nino to a neutral year and calling it a negative trend is poor science, also known as cherry picking.

If you take the trend to the current time and pick the start point as the most recent date where the uncertainty is less than the absolute value of the trend, what you wind up with is the trend from 2008 which is 0.289 +/- 0.242 C per decade.

I already showed this to be false in a previous post, the rate of warming has been variable since 1997.

The rate of warming is always variable, but on average it has decreased since 1997. You cannot show that the pause did not exist. It is supported on a huge scientific literature corpus, so your claims are irrelevant.

the uncertainty in that measurement means you can not be sure that the trend is negative.

Again you show a very poor understanding of the meaning of statistical significance. Let’s see if with an example.

Say a doctor is testing a new drug with only 10 patients. He measures a real improvement on 8 of the patients. His hypothesis is that it is the drug, but statistic analysis says that the null-hypothesis, that it is not the drug, cannot be ruled out. He needs a much larger test group and negative control to be able to determine that the drug is useful or it will not be approved. Statistics can tell him the number of patients He has to use to know at a certain probability level if the hypothesis is correct or not.

Statistic analysis does not say that the improvement of the 8 patients did not take place and it does not say that their improvement was not due to the drug. In the same way statistic analysis does not say that the cooling since 2016.2 did not take place. The cooling has taken (is taking) place and the trend for that cooling is negative. Your idea that we cannot be sure that the trend is negative is ridiculous. It is something that has been measured. How could it not be real?

You mistake what statistic analysis says about a hypothesis and real measurements. You would go to the doctor and would tell him that he cannot be sure that the improvement in the patients is real, and he would look at you as if you are crazy. What a silly notion.

Picking a period from a El Nino to a neutral year and calling it a negative trend is poor science

I am not picking anything. Gaussian smoothing works by distributing power from the peaks and throughs towards both sides, without displacing the peaks. It is very informative on how the rate of warming changes over time. It shows that the highest rate of warming of the entire 20th century was reached in 1997, and there is a clear downward trend since, interrupted temporarily by the strong 2015 El Niño.

So we are still warming, that’s what the data and statistics say.

We are cooling, but self-deception knows no limits. As time goes by the statistics on the global warming deceleration should become stronger. For someone capable of saying that the measured cooling is not real it poses no problem. Global warming will continue for you even if it is cooling. That is the problem of religions, they are immune to contrary evidence.

“The final paper shows that the recent pause in global surface temperature rise does not materially alter the risks of substantial warming of the Earth by the end of this century. Nor does it invalidate the fundamental physics of global warming, the scientific basis of climate models and their estimates of climate sensitivity.”

Being a part of big pharma, I know we don’t do efficacy studies on cohorts of 10 patients. So your example is totally fictious.

Like I said before and you are not getting it

The rate since 2016.2 by HADCRUT4 is -0.966 +/- 1.382

That’s the measured trend with uncertainty, and it means you can not rule out that it could be warming at up to 0.416 C per decade at 95% confidence level.

If your hypothesis is that it is cooling, then the null is that it is warming at the previous rate.

The data show that you can not exclude the null, therefore your claim that it is cooling is not supported by the evidence.

Sorry Charlie, you are the one holding on to views not supported by the evidence.

So your evidence that there was no pause is a paragraph from the Met that states there was a pause. What’s not to like about that tactical move to push your case. Hardly a strategy from the Perry Mason book on influencing juries.

You might check out a local junior college to see if they offer remedial classes on statistics. Education is a wonderful life long pursuit.

I think you are getting worked up on pretty minor point. What ever Javier says, if it cools we will know it. If it doesn’t we will know it. In time he will be proved right or wrong. With the caveat, of course, that the ubiquitous adjustments don’t make the cooling magically disappear.

Just from a purely public relations perspective, the recovery of Arctic Sea Ice will gain more global notoriety than a small lack of warming. So many journalists have made their reputations on the No Arctic Sea Ice in the Summer stories, that when that peters out as a surefire catastrophic headline, some scribes will be looking for work and seeking out grief counselors.

Are you playing ignorant, now? Or you really are that ignorant about published climate science.“Global mean surface temperatures rose rapidly from the 1970s, but there has been little further warming over the most recent 10 to 15 years to 2013.”
UK Met Office Synopsis report CSc 02 The recent pause in global warming (2): What are the potential causes?

I guess they know better than you.

“A large body of scientific evidence — amassed before and since the Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC AR5)1 — indicates that the so-called surface warming slowdown, also sometimes referred to in the literature as the hiatus, was due to the combined effects of internal decadal variability and natural forcing (volcanic and solar) superimposed on human-caused warming.”
Fyfe, J.C. et al. 2016. Making sense of the early-2000s warming slowdown. Nature Climate Change, 6 (3), 224.

If you don’t know the bibliography you shouldn’t be discussing this issue.

The rate since 2016.2 by HADCRUT4 is -0.966 +/- 1.382 That’s the measured trend with uncertainty, and it means you can not rule out that it could be warming at up to 0.416 C per decade at 95% confidence level.

Temperature anomaly has fallen from +1.111°C to +0.608°C from February 2016 to December 2018 (monthly HadCRUT4.6 data). That’s over 0.5°C loss. I don’t know about you, but to me that is no warming. It is a huge cooling. Another one like that and we go back near the 1961-1990 average.

If your hypothesis is that it is cooling, then the null is that it is warming at the previous rate.

It cannot be warming at the previous rate since it has already been demonstrated and published that the rate has declined.

Statistic analysis cannot say that patients that have improved have not, and that temperatures that have decreased have not. It is not my hypothesis that it is cooling. It is the reality based on evidence.

I am enjoying every moment of it. I knew it was coming when in 2015 the pause was declared dead and you alarmists were gloating on the Niño warming. You never understood the pause. It is part of the 65-yr oscillation, and now the low is coinciding with low solar activity. All the warming since 2013 and more will be lost.

First the skeptics will start cheering, then the papers will start coming. How is it going to be called? The re-pause? Get ready for it. Alarmists have no clue how the climate changes, and why.

Not sure how you can translate “the rate of warming is decelerating” into “it is cooling,” Javier.

Two different things. Rate of warming decelerating since 1997 is a well known phenomenon dubbed the Pause. Huge amount of literature on it.
“It is cooling” is what it has been happening since February 2016, as temperature records indicate.

Both things are related as cooling reduces the rate of warming, and a low rate of warming makes cooling more probable.

Irrelevant. It is daylight somewhere and getting warmer there. That’s why we try to measure the global surface average temperature anomaly. Then you are in business to see if the planet is warming or cooling.

Apparently it is not a problem when it is warming, it only becomes a problem if it is cooling. It is not supposed to happen, is it?

So the recent rate is uncertain, even though the temperature has changed from 0.94 in 2016.2 to 0.62 as of the latest measurement.

And Frye says this clearly

” A warming slowdown is thus clear in
68 observations; it is also clear that it has been a “slowdown” not a “stop”.”

The MET office also says this ” Using this more physically interpretable 1972-
229 2001 baseline, we find that the surface warming from 2001-2014 is significantly smaller than the baseline warming rate.”

This may be true, but the rate for this period is not statistically significant as the rate is 0.007 +/- 0.145 C per decade. Too uncertain to call it a pause.

To me a pause is statistically significant rate of 0.05 C per decade or less.
Frye doesn’t provide evidence of that, and they don’t proved a good definition of a pause either.

I do my best with your very complex language, Willard.
Anyway I suppose you are aware of the concept of “recent.” If we want to know what the climate is doing and not what it has done, we must concentrate on the most recent part of the record.

It’s the calling it “cooling” that is problematic here.

Why? You have an allergy or something?

It turns out that when compared with other short cooling periods… Am I allowed to do that? …the recent cooling turns out to be quite remarkable. A top contender in terms of length and temperature loss, only comparable to similar periods in the 50s-70s.

Exactly, thanks. I have been trying to explain that to skeptics of solar variability effect on climate for ages. They insist a decrease in solar activity should produce a decrease in temperatures, but I say that it should only reduce the rate of warming if solar activity is still above average. Good to see someone else understanding this.

People have a lot of problem with this concept. Curious, no?

The thing, Willard is that since February 2016 we are observing cooling, not reduced warming. Yet it is true that if we want to average the rate for a longer period, including periods of warming, depending on where we stop averaging, we get reduced warming. Einstein already warned that it all depends on where we set our reference frame.

It is not what I fancy, the last three years we did not get reduced warming (how absurd), we got cooling. The effect over longer periods is of reduced warming. As you can see I have no problem distinguishing both. Is the problem on your side?

The anomaly is still positive.
If I bought a stock that gave me a 1% dividend last quarter, I’m not losing capital because the stock only gives me a 0.25% dividend this quarter.
Please advise.

It is not the stock dividend but the stock price. If the stock had an initial price of $10, you bought at $100 and it is now priced at $90, The stock has a net gain of $90/share, while you have a net loss of $10/share. The price of the stock fell since you bought. Nobody says that the price drop is not real or statistically non-significant.

Climate change is going to continue giving dividends to those involved in maintaining the anthropogenic farce regardless of what temperature does.

If I were frying an egg and found the pan was warmer than the egg, I’d point out the at some future time that would not longer true as the pan would cool while warming the egg. Egg vengeance I think Dana and I would call it. The pan would change from not warming the egg so much to warming it to the point of incineration. If the egg was too done or not enough done at any time, it’s obvious the pan is at fault. I’ve heard it said, we hide God in things we can’t explain. Once we explain his current location, he moves to another one. So God is in the frying pan and the oceans, until he’s not. We hide God in time. If I don’t like the long term, I find God in the short term, and the other way around as well. A record annual temperature is God. Until God takes a break and it’s only the 4th warmest year. When sea ice falls in the North, God has moved to the Southern sea ice. Or the high deserts of Antarctica. Or the deep oceans, or into a snow storm. I admit both sides are guilty of such things.

Re: “I am enjoying every moment of it. I knew it was coming when in 2015 the pause was declared dead and you alarmists were gloating on the Niño warming. You never understood the pause. It is part of the 65-yr oscillation, and now the low is coinciding with low solar activity. All the warming since 2013 and more will be lost.”

Let me know when the warming in all of the following goes away, because that has yet to happen:
– ocean heat content
– near-surface air
– sea surface temperature
– troposphere

Also, let me know when there’s evidence of Earth achieving an energy balance, instead of the continued energy imbalance.

[from: “Decadal ocean heat redistribution since the late 1990s and its association with key climate modes”]

And it’s amazing how many people falsely predicted an end to global warming, using an over-reliance on a ~60 year cycle or the AMO. The list includes:

Re: “No curve fitting is necessary. Temperature rate of change has decreased since 1997.5 as hundreds of scientific papers about the pause attest.”

Not really. There wasn’t a statistically significant change in the rate of warming, as shown in numerous papers. Of course, one can get a change that is not statistically significant, but that’s trivially easy to do. You could get that with almost any sufficiently small sample size. For example, I could claim that since my fair coin came up with 4 heads in a row when I flipped it 4 times, then there’s been a change (that is not statistically significant) in whether my coin gives a 50/50 ratio of heads-to-tails. Similarly, you could claim a non-statistically-significant “pause” or “hiatus” each time temperature didn’t increase for a year, or a month, or a day, or a second, or… That doesn’t mean the change is statistically robust.

The outdated 2013 source you cited (it doesn’t include recent warming) also notes the role of sample size here, the dangers of relying on small sample sizes, etc.:

“The recent pause in global warming (2): What are the potential causes?
[…]
There are several important messages to be taken from this study. Firstly, it demonstrates that very little can be concluded from 10-year trends with respect to global warming since the distributions of trends overlap substantially. It is only with averaging periods of 30 years or longer that climate change can be detected robustly. Secondly, the results show that a pause of 10 years’ duration is likely to occur due to internal fluctuations about twice every century. Thirdly, the results also show that beyond periods of 20 years and longer, a pause of that duration occurring from natural, internal variability in the absence of other changes in external forcing appears to be unlikely.”

Moreover, the PCC made the same point, but you might not know that, given how much contrarians went on and on about the IPCC acknowledging a “pause” or “hiatus”:

IPCC AR5, chapter 2, page 162:“In addition to robust multidecadal warming, global mean surface temperature exhibits substantial decadal and interannual variability. Owing to natural variability, trends based on short records are very sensitive to the beginning and end dates and do not in general reflect long-term climate trends. As one example, the rate of warming over the past 15 years (1998–2012; 0.05 [–0.05 to +0.15] °C per decade), which begins with a strong El Niño, is smaller than the rate calculated since 1951 (1951–2012; 0.12 [0.08 to 0.14] °C per decade).”

Here’s some material for you on this:

“Decadal ocean heat redistribution since the late 1990s and its association with key climate modes”
[…]
The importance of differing definitions of a “hiatus” was discussed in Medhaug et al. […] where contradictory conclusions can arise in the literature based on the definition. Consequently, elucidating the various different definitions of “pause” or “hiatus” is important.
Among the common definitions of pause/hiatus are: (1) a statistically significant change in the rate of global warming, as measured by changes to the heat balance of the planet; (2) a statistically significant change in the surface temperature record; (3) a non-statistically significant change in the rate of GMST [global mean surface temperature] change; and (4) Divergence between GMST predictions (from climate modes) and actual GMST measurements. Unfortunately, these definitions are often conflated and their separate identities must be maintained.So, has there been a pause in global warming? The answer would be mistakenly “yes” only if one defines the “global warming” only by GMST changes (definition 3 above).”

And here are some more sources on this, with respect to continued warming, particularly in larger samples in which statistically significant results would be more likely:

“A fluctuation in surface temperature in historical context: reassessment and retrospective on the evidence”
“Debunking the climate hiatus”
“Lack of evidence for a slowdown in global temperature”
“Change points of global temperature”
“The “pause” in global warming: turning a routine fluctuation into a problem for science”
“Global temperature evolution: recent trends and some pitfalls”
“Recently amplified Arctic warming has contributed to a continual global warming trend”
“On the definition and identifiability of the alleged “hiatus” in global warming”
“Regional trend changes in recent surface warming”
Pages 145 and 150: “Signal detection in global mean temperatures after “Paris”: an uncertainty and sensitivity analysis”
“Distinguishing trends and shifts from memory in climate data”
“The global warming hiatus: Slowdown or redistribution?”
“Has there been a hiatus?”
“An apparent hiatus in global warming?”
“Estimating changes in global temperature since the pre-industrial period”
“Coverage bias in the HadCRUT4 temperature series and its impact on recent temperature trends”
Hansen et al.: “Global temperature in 2015”
“Possible artifacts of data biases in the recent global surface warming hiatus”
“Statistical analysis of coverage error in simple global temperature estimators”

it’s amazing how many people falsely predicted an end to global warming, using an over-reliance on a ~60 year cycle or the AMO.
Your’s should be included as well.

If you are going to include me in a list do it correctly. I have not predicted an imminent end to global warming. If you read my article about 21st century climate my predictions are there. The millennial cycle should end some time between 2050 and 2100, and that is when global warming will end.

What we are having now is a period of reduced warming and perhaps slight cooling between 2002-~2035. You can put me on record saying that no further global warming is possible until solar activity goes back to average levels, and I expect that to happen with solar cycle 26. I have circulated this figure for some time:

It is from late 2017. Temperature is now below the golden arrow. So far so good.

What are you predicting for 2019-2035, a continuation of global warming? Like IPCC (red arrow)?

I suppose you still don’t realize that defining warming as an acceleration implies that constantly warm something does not warm it according to that definition, Javier.

Are you familiar with Physics 101? Have you ever studied dynamics. That is probably the analogy that can illustrate the situation.

In dynamics position is equivalent to temperature, velocity is equivalent to temperature rate of change (positive -> warming, negative -> cooling), and acceleration is equivalent to warming/cooling acceleration/deceleration. Acceleration (positive or negative) is caused by forces acting on the body, and results in a change in the velocity of the body. Warming/cooling acceleration/deceleration is caused by forcings acting on the climate system, and results in a change in the temperature rate of change.

Constantly warming something means the acceleration is zero, but the velocity (rate of temperature change) is positive, and therefore the temperature increases.

So WARMING IS NOT AN ACCELERATION, it is a velocity or first derivative of the position (temperature).

Since 1997 the velocity (rate) of warming has been decreasing, meaning a deceleration in the warming rate (a forcing must be acting). As the deceleration has continued over time, once the velocity (rate) of warming crosses the zero line, warming turns into cooling. This has already happened due to the last three years of cooling, but it is not yet statistically significant. The decrease in rate of warming since 1997 is statistically significant.

The IPCC has a problem in that it does not see any natural forcing between 1951-2011 (and it appears since 1750). Therefore it cannot explain what it is happening except as a random phenomenon, a statistical fluctuation.

A storm is coming. If it was difficult to explain the Pause in 2013, imagine in the 2020s.

WARMING IS NOT AN ACCELERATION
Javier, meet Javier:
We define “warming” as a positive rate of temperature change over time.

You still don’t have the concepts clear despite my efforts. “a positive rate of temperature change over time” means the first derivative has a positive value, and therefore temperature has a positive velocity (i.e. temperature is increasing). It doesn’t say anything about how the velocity is changing (acceleration).

I insist: WARMING IS VELOCITY, NOT ACCELERATION. As long as it is positive temperature increases, regardless of it being accelerating or decelerating.

> “a positive rate of temperature change over time” means the first derivative has a positive value, and therefore temperature has a positive velocity (i.e. temperature is increasing). It doesn’t say anything about how the velocity is changing (acceleration).

In your ontology, it is what you call the temperature change that should be the velocity – an anomaly is already the difference between the observed temperature and a reference value. (It surely can’t be speed, as speed isn’t negative.) Once you temperature anomalies over time, you get the acceleration. Anyone who has access thy Wiki should in principle be able to validate that intuition, but it also coheres with the first sentence of this paragraph you wrote:

Since 1997 the velocity (rate) of warming has been decreasing, meaning a deceleration in the warming rate (a forcing must be acting). As the deceleration has continued over time, once the velocity (rate) of warming crosses the zero line, warming turns into cooling. This has already happened due to the last three years of cooling, but it is not yet statistically significant. The decrease in rate of warming since 1997 is statistically significant.

The distinction you try to establish in the rest of the paragraph cuts no ice for the simple reason that all the anomalies we’re discussing are positive.

You don’t make sense. Perhaps the word anomaly confuses you. It is just the zero reference in a temperature scale, exactly the same as the Celsius zero is at the Kelvin scale 273. That some Celsius temperatures observed are all positive has nothing to do with observing warming or cooling. It is just a matter of convenience. Going from +22 °C to +12 °C has always been cooling, not warming.

Temperature anomaly is temperature on a certain scale and its change over time is velocity, not acceleration. I really don’t think you can get any lower in showing you don’t understand these important issues to how the temperature of the surface of the planet changes over time.

If you don’t understand it, why are you discussing about it? Political identification?

If your temperature anomaly is positive at one point, it already means it’s warming compared to some long-term average. That’s your “velocity” right there (to take your own wordology) and I hope you know what’s the differential of a velocity. If all the anomalies you discuss are positive, it’s impossible it’s not warming. If one redefines cooling as a short-term negative variation in the warming from one time to the next, that means you could say it is both cooling and warming at a later time, because you’re juggling with many frames of reference.

This confusion may be why you end up with the title that the planet is no longer warming, a claim that is ludicrous considering the anomalies in the data. That’s also why you mess up the financial analogy. A positive anomaly is a profit, and a lesser positive anomaly is still a profit. (It’s even adjusted for inflation, so to speak, as kid fails to see.)

Instead of tying yourself in more knots or trying to flex more biceps, it might time to clarify the connection between what you do what you say. If you don’t, I’m afraid your work will become a “Cambridge moment,” to borrow a concept from formal ontology. At least acknowledge that you’re selling an absence of a thing based on spurious results.

“In statistics, the standard deviation (SD, also represented by the lower case Greek letter sigma σ or the Latin letter s) is a measure that is used to quantify the amount of variation or dispersion of a set of data values.[1] A low standard deviation indicates that the data points tend to be close to the mean (also called the expected value) of the set, while a high standard deviation indicates that the data points are spread out over a wider range of values.” Wikipedia

“This study examines changes in Earth’s energy budget during and after the global warming “pause” (or “hiatus”) using observations from the Clouds and the Earth’s Radiant Energy System. We find a marked 0.83 ± 0.41 Wm−2 reduction in global mean reflected shortwave (SW) top-of-atmosphere (TOA) flux during the three years following the hiatus that results in an increase in net energy into the climate system. A partial radiative perturbation analysis reveals that decreases in low cloud cover are the primary driver of the decrease in SW TOA flux. The regional distribution of the SW TOA flux changes associated with the decreases in low cloud cover closely matches that of sea-surface temperature warming, which shows a pattern typical of the positive phase of the Pacific Decadal Oscillation.” https://www.mdpi.com/2225-1154/6/3/62

Although the trend is the expected value – it is the variation that sums to climate and has more intrinsic interest.

What is needed is not a course in statistics but more clarity – and less motivation – in thought.

You should know that the derivation is a mathematical procedure that doesn’t add any uncertainty. Time doesn’t have any uncertainty either. The only uncertainty comes from temperature measurements that we are told it is ±0.1 °C.

We want to know the uncertainty in the rate of change with respect to time.

Then by all means do the calculations. I hope you don’t want me to do them for you.

And your nice graph show that you can not rule out that the acceleration in the rate of temperature change could still be positive.

Oh gosh! Not again. You still haven’t understood. The uncertainty in the linear fit refers to the linear fit. We know the acceleration in the rate of temperature change has not been positive because we have measured the temperature change. If the acceleration had been positive the temperature should have increased a lot, and it hasn’t. Between 1997 and 2018 temperature has increased a lot less than between 1976 and 1997 (same period length). You must learn to distinguish reality from statistical significance to avoid making a fool of yourself in the real world outside climate change. Within climate change it doesn’t matter so much that you make a fool of yourself cause so many people is doing it.

But your graph is a linear fit to the rate, which means what is plotted by the straight line is the acceleration.

It is costing you also a lot. No sciences background?

The straight line IS NOT the acceleration. What a silly notion. The acceleration has been changing all the time. The straight line is just a fit. I could draw a curve by hand and that would also be a fit. My hand drawn curve would probably be a better fit to the data than the straight line (I have a good hand). The straight line is not even a best fit. Statistically a best fit can be found. And yet even a best fit is only a fit, not the real acceleration.

As the acceleration has been changing all the time, because forcings act on the temperature rate of change all the time, it is not represented very well by a straight line. That is one of the reasons the uncertainty is so large, the other being that the temperature rate of change data is very noisy.

What we do know, and the straight line is trying to approach that, is that global warming has shown an overall deceleration since 1997. No amount of statistics can tell you that what has decelerated could actually have accelerated. Statistics doesn’t have an opinion about what is real and has been measured beyond measurement uncertainty. It does have an opinion about being able to rule out chance or not as the cause of the observation.

You should learn to understand what statistical significance means, it allows you to tell what is real from what might not be real.

Well, it seems I can’t learn any statistics from you because you really don’t know what statistics is about. A common problem nowadays.

If a patient has improved, it could be due to the experimental drug he tried, or it could be due to chance, or it could be due to the placebo effect, or it could be due to another thousand reasons, but no amount of statistics can tell you that the patient HASN’T IMPROVED.

Statistics never tells you what is real and what is not, because statistics doesn’t know anything about reality. Something that it is extremely improbable is still real when it happens.

I didn’t say the straight line was the acceleration. I said what is plotted by the straight line is the acceleration. It’s the slope of the straight line fit that is the acceleration, which you are saying is negative, but for the uncertainty in the fit, we don’t know what the exact value is, we only have an estimate.

“No amount of statistics can tell you that what has decelerated could actually have accelerated.”

You are having troubles understanding what uncertainty means, when you have a measurement as you say the rate of change in temperature has dropped or decelerated, but since the uncertainty does not allow the exclusion of a value of 0 and can’t determine if the real value is positive or negative, you cant claim it’s one or the other.

Yes I have a science background, a BS degree and actually use statistics in my job, and haven’t been fire or reprimanded for my use of statistics, I can only conclude that my understanding of statistics meets some minimum value greater that zero. But regulated by the FDA, so it’s a low bar.

Well as far as work goes, lately it’s been slow, because I work with a drug used to test the efficacy of other drugs used to treat a common malady among the elderly.

And it’s been slow because the FDA put a stop to almost all the trials because the statistics said “patient HASN’T IMPROVED.”

The thing I have been trying to say it that the more data points you have the more likely it is that you will be able to use statistics to determine whether the data confirms the hypothesis or confirms the null hypothesis.

Your graph shows that you don’t have enough data to confirm your hypothesis or the reject the null.

As you say

“What we do know, and the straight line is trying to approach that, is that global warming has shown an overall deceleration since 1997. No amount of statistics can tell you that what has decelerated could actually have accelerated. Statistics doesn’t have an opinion about what is real and has been measured beyond measurement uncertainty. It does have an opinion about being able to rule out chance or not as the cause of the observation.”

The straight line is the best estimate of the fit which looks to be negative, but due to the noise of the data and the short term of the measurements, but not necessarily the real value. Statistics tells us there is a range of values that are supported by the data which in this case may be positive or negative, and therefore highly uncertain.

“Statistics never tells you what is real and what is not, because statistics doesn’t know anything about reality. Something that it is extremely improbable is still real when it happens.”

Statistics tells what is likely to be real and can put a value on the probability of something being real or not.
In the case of your graph, the 5% to 95% range includes both positive and negative values for the slope of the blue line or the acceleration in the rate of change of temperature.

Javier, you still haven’t said how you’re calculating the first and second derivatives.

And an uncertainty analysis is necessary, to tell if these derivatives are statistically significant.

But I think you’re going about this all wrong. A better way to determine acceleration would be to fit a 2nd-order polynomial to the HadCRUT temperature data over the interval from time t0 to now. Then the second derivative is 2a, where a is the coefficient of the t^2 term in the 2nd-order polynomial. Then you find the latest t0 where the 2nd derivative is negative.

This would make it easy to get the uncertainty of a, and hence the acceleration, too. And the Pearson coefficient, for goodness-of-fit. But I don’t think it will matter much, regardless.

Since you need statistics to eat, I’ll try to explain more. And if the patients don’t improve no amount of statistics will show they do.

The statistics of a fit refer to that fit alone. This is very clear when you consider that a different fit will have different statistics. Therefore the statistics of a fit will not tell us anything about the data. They cannot tell us if the data shows faster or slower warming. That is an observation and does not require statistics. The observation that today is raining doesn’t require any statistics to determine if it is actually raining or not. Even if you are in the desert, when it is raining, it is raining. Statistics can tell you how unlikely it is, but it could never tell you that it is not raining.

That at 95% confidence range of a linear fit an increase is possible only means that there is an >5% change that a positive slope straight line would fit better the data. It does not tell us that there is an >5% chance that accelerated warming has taken place. First, the statistics refer to the fit, and second, a decelerated warming has been measured.

Statistics tells what is likely to be real and can put a value on the probability of something being real or not.

As I said statistics doesn’t say anything about reality. If a cake was eaten among 20 people, and my hypothesis is that only one of them ate cake, statistics will tell me that it has a low probability. Yet, I might happen to know that only one of them ate the cake. A priori probabilities are useful in many ways and help us take rational decisions, but they are statistical inferences, not the reality. When we have measurements and observations, we “know” what has happened, and statistics can only help to establish how likely is a proposed cause.

The reduction in the rate of warming (warming deceleration) is an observation. The discussion has never been about it being real or not, but about its cause. To some an aleatory fluctuation, to others an enthalpy transfer within different parts of the climate system. Explanations abound.

I recognized in the comments to the WUWT article that I was jumping the gun regarding the cooling, but that is my choice. When in 2015 I said that there was a September Arctic sea-ice melting pause Tamino attacked me on statistics grounds. Three and a half years later the pause continues. When you know who ate the cake, you can beat the statistics.

Oh Bob – it is just 2 sigma – twice the standard deviation from the expected value to give the 95% confidence interval for a normal distribution. But as I said = it is the variance that is interesting here – not the trend.

Bob – you said yourself you have no statistics training. And it shows with your focus on advising people to do online courses rather than on the relevant simple statistics.

You imply that the observed response to Pacific SST is short term as opposed to TOA greenhouse gas forcing. I show with a millennial scale – and related – instrumental record that this is not so. It is conveniently compared by Koutsoyiannis to random roulette wheel statistics so that hopefully Bob can see the difference. The questions for Bob are what is the Hurst Nile River exponent and why does it matter?

One, I was suggesting that one individual learn some basic statistics that I have learned on the job or through self study, because they are abusing and torturing data to get support for their preconceived notions.

Second, no matter what you have shown about millenial scale changes in the TOA, you cited a study that showed short term changes in TOA making a difference.

Thirdly,

You will have to show what the Nile river levels between 600 and 1500 have anything to do with the recent warming, which is what the topic is.
I note your graph doesn’t run to the current date, I might ask you why?
And you just pull one graph from a paper, and don’t even provide a link, that’s not good manners.

One, I was suggesting that one individual learn some basic statistics that I have learned on the job or through self study, because they are abusing and torturing data to get support for their preconceived notions.

It’s a climate ball game indistinguishable to those that the post identifies. Far be it for me to support Javier’s graphology – but the simple statistics of variance bounds is merely bait and switch.

Second, no matter what you have shown about millenial scale changes in the TOA, you cited a study that showed short term changes in TOA making a difference.

“A partial radiative perturbation analysis reveals that decreases in low cloud cover are the primary driver of the decrease in SW TOA flux. The regional distribution of the SW TOA flux changes associated with the decreases in low cloud cover closely matches that of sea-surface temperature warming, which shows a pattern typical of the positive phase of the Pacific Decadal Oscillation.”

What it shows is the Pacific SST/cloud anti-correlation driving global energy dynamics in the ‘post hiatus’ period. One should then focus on how Pacific SST changes over time. This is not random.

Thirdly,

You will have to show what the Nile river levels between 600 and 1500 have anything to do with the recent warming, which is what the topic is.
I note your graph doesn’t run to the current date, I might ask you why?
And you just pull one graph from a paper, and don’t even provide a link, that’s not good manners.

No – really – the topic is climate ball. But Nile River flow is correlated with the Pacific state. And I would recommend a short course in Demetris Koutsoyiannis.

“However Mandelbrot, as early as 1965 5,7 and contemporary with his work on fGn and fractional Brownian motion (fBm), showed that at least one other type of non-stationary model could exhibit the Hurst effect.”

And how does this manifest in the behavior of all sorts of dynamical systems?

“The fractionally dimensioned space occupied by the trajectories of the solutions of these nonlinear equations became known as the Lorenz attractor (figure 1), which suggests that nonlinear systems, such as the atmosphere, may exhibit regime-like structures that are, although fully deterministic, subject to abrupt and seemingly random change.” https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/full/10.1098/rsta.2011.0161

“Every single catastrophic scenario considered by the IPCC AR5 (WGII, Table 12.4) has a rating of very unlikely or exceptionally unlikely and/or has low confidence. The only tipping point that the IPCC considers likely in the 21st century is disappearance of Arctic summer sea ice (which is fairly reversible, since sea ice freezes every winter).”

Look at ice core data on Greenland and History. The Arctic was open during the Medieval Warm Period. That is when there was enough evaporation and snowfall to rebuild sequestered ice in the Northern Hemisphere, on Greenland and other cold northern places. That is where the ice came from that did cause the Little Ice Age and froze the Arctic again. During the Little Ice Age, there was no Polar evaporation and little snowfall on Greenland and other cold places where ice was sequestered. Sequestered Ice Depleted and then retreated and that caused this normal, natural and necessary Modern Warm Period. Sequestered Ice in the NH is replenished when the Polar Oceans are warmer and thawed. Sequestered Ice in the NH is depleted when Polar Oceans are colder and frozen. This is evidence recorded in the Ice Cores from Greenland.
Yes, Arctic Sea Ice is a tipping point. When there is much Arctic Sea Ice there is very little evaporation and snowfall in cold places on sequestered ice. When there is little Arctic Sea Ice there is much evaporation and snowfall in cold places on sequestered ice. Ewing and Donn published this in the 1950’s and 1960’s. It was discounted then and it is being discounted today. It is recorded in the ice cores and history.

The Vikings moved to Greenland and grew crops and lived there because the polar region was warmer. China sent a fleet of ships who had interactions with the Vikings and who did map the Arctic because it was thawed. Ice core data and history show these things did happen.

It is common sense that the oceans are thawed and open in warm times. It is common sense that the oceans are frozen in cold times.

Data shows ice accumulation in Greenland is more in warmer times. It is common sense that snow accumulation can only be more when oceans are thawed to allow evaporation and snowfall.

How is it possible that anyone could believe consensus theory that ice on land increases when oceans are frozen and there is no evaporation and snowfall?

“Thinking that catastrophes like major hurricane landfalls, massive forest fires etc. will be ‘cured’ by eliminating fossil fuel emissions is laughable. Well its not really funny. Thinking that eliminating fossil fuel emissions will ‘solve’ the problem of extreme weather events is very sad, sort of on the level of doing rain dances.”

You shouldn’t use straw-man arguments, its the rate and severity of these catastrophes that eliminating fossil fuel use that is hoped to be achieved.

No one thinks that eliminating fossil fuel use will stop hurricane and forest fires.

And the recent confirmation of Hansen’s doubling rate of Greenland’s ice sheet means that the IPCC estimate of sea level rise may be way too low.
Which will increase the danger from the hurricanes.

I don’t even think Hansen thinks the threat is existential this century, maybe by several centuries later.

Bob, your drive-by sniping at Dr. Curry is obvious. Everyone knows what she meant in her brief comment. Yours is the strawman argument.

And when your say “… its the rate and severity of these catastrophes that eliminating fossil fuel use that is hoped to be achieved.” I assume you mean ‘increases’ in the rate and severity of natural climatic manifestations.

Since there are no studies showing the rate of these natural climatic manifestations are increasing, the purported rationale for eliminating fossil fuels is lacking. With increased infrastructure at risk, one might stretch the argument for increasing severity.

Then I’ll cherry pick this abstract, I’m sure you are familiar with it.

“We examined the number of tropical cyclones and cyclone days as well as tropical cyclone intensity over the past 35 years, in an environment of increasing sea surface temperature. A large increase was seen in the number and proportion of hurricanes reaching categories 4 and 5. The largest increase occurred in the North Pacific, Indian, and Southwest Pacific Oceans, and the smallest percentage increase occurred in the North Atlantic Ocean. These increases have taken place while the number of cyclones and cyclone days has decreased in all basins except the North Atlantic during the past decade.”

The study period of 35 years is about half the cycle of warming/cooling oceans. And “… These increases have taken place while the number of cyclones and cyclone days has decreased in all basins except the North Atlantic during the past decade.”

That means there is no basis for asserting that AGW is causing more severe nor frequent bad weather.

I know this doesn’t address the specifics of Bob’s comments,but I thought I would provide a little historical perspective for those who think ancient history is defined as when Sonny and Cher performed as a duo. Garcia-Herrera 2005 researched Spanish records of Atlantic hurricanes and tabulated 825 hurricanes for the period 1500-1900. I know this doesn’t address the intensity issue, but there might be some within the more gullible and naive segments of our society who believe hurricanes and strong hurricanes only began in 1950.

major hurricane landfalls, massive forest fires…
its the rate and severity of these catastrophes that eliminating fossil fuel use that is hoped to be achieved.

There is no evidence the rates of these things has changed wrt to the period of peak warming since 1975.

There is evidence of a millenial scale decrease of massive forest fires in the tree scar record and the ash sediment record.

There is also evidence of a century scale decrease of major hurricane landfalls.

So, any decisions regarding energy from a climate catastrophe aspect are not borne out by empirical evidence, but are probably invoked because of emotional response. Politically effective, perhaps, but not science.

bobNo one thinks that eliminating fossil fuel use will stop hurricane and forest fires.

Yes they do Bob. Look around you at the beauties in the SJW ranks. That is exactly what many of them “think”. Weather itself is Republican. Hard left social justice nirvana means no atmosphere and no ocean.

No David, the evaporated water does not necessarily go back to the sea, especially in the decade to century timescale. There is the potential for replenishing the deep aquifers and building up the ice caps that can make a significant difference to sea level rise.

If anything is getting worse or if anything is not getting better is not what we should be discussing. Climate has changed for better and for worse for all times in history and data. We did not cause past climate change, No one says we influenced climate before the most recent century. Natural climate change did not suddenly quit. Natural climate change is causing what is happening now and it is normal, natural, necessary and not stoppable.

They must scare people to tax and control and help themselves and their friends sell electricity for much higher prices from renewable sources.

Fight on, only constant fact and observation based arguments can hope to convince the public of realistic impacts of small incremental changes in climate. Eventually, in the long run the credibility of CAGW will be destroyed.

Twelve years from now, with the coming ice age scare, all will be forgotten.

The policy emphasis of the climate activist witnesses was focused on massive new government and private spending for a combination of green energy projects and climate-justified infrastructure projects. Of the activist witnesses, only Governor Baker of Massachusetts understood the importance of nuclear power, and only Dr. Kim Cobb understood the importance of massive energy conservation measures in meeting the green activist’s carbon reduction targets.

As we would expect, among all the witnesses, only Judith Curry’s testimony covered the uncertainties of climate science and the risks of relying solely on the renewables for our electric power.

It is impossible to compress a hundred year’s worth of technological and economic transition away from carbon fuels into a thirty-year time span without experiencing major collateral impacts. Little or nothing has been said by climate activists concerning what these impacts might be. It’s all upside; there is little or no downside. That’s their story, and they are sticking to it.

If the policy objective is a recommitment to Barack Obama’s goal of an 80% reduction in America’s GHG emissions by 2050, then spending unlimited amounts of money on wind, solar, hydro, energy storage, and nuclear won’t get us there. The only possible means of greatly reducing America’s carbon emissions in the short span of time climate activists are now seeking is to put a stiff price on all carbon fuels and to use the Clean Air Act to its maximum legal effectiveness in directly regulating all major sources of our carbon emissions, not just coal.

And even this kind of forceful approach won’t be enough to get the job done. If America is to achieve an 80% reduction in our GHG emissions by 2050, a program of government-mandated carbon fuel rationing combined with strictly enforced energy conservation measures covering all sectors of the American economy must eventually be adopted.

More likely than not, Donald Trump will be defeated in the 2020 election. It’s also likely that control of the Senate will pass into the hands of the Democrats. If past history is any guide, it’s unlikely the Democrats in Congress will enact a stiff tax on carbon. It’s just as unlikely the Congress will acknowledge the need for a carbon fuel rationing program beginning in the mid to late 2030’s if their Green New Deal spending isn’t achieving their carbon reduction targets.

So the question arises, is new legislation from the Congress needed to pursue a highly aggressive, nationally-enforced anti-carbon program based on strict enforcement of the Clean Air Act?

The answer is no. The Supreme Court has already ruled that the EPA has full authority under the Clean Air Act to regulate all sources of America’s carbon emissions; and further, that the process used by the EPA in 2009 to determine that CO2 is a pollutant was properly followed. The Executive Branch and the EPA now have all the authority needed to pursue a highly aggressive anti-carbon policy, if they choose to do so.

Here is a plan to reduce America’s GHG emissions 80% by 2050 using the existing legal authorities of the President as enabled by the Clean Air Act and by existing national security legislation. This plan is similar to the one that was being pushed by 350.org and by other environmental groups in 2009.

In this version, the original 350.org plan is augmented by a system of carbon pollution fines which is the functional equivalent of a legislated tax on carbon. Moreover, if carbon pricing combined with massive new spending on green energy projects doesn’t prove to be fully effective, the plan adds a provisional system for imposing direct government control over the production and distribution of all carbon fuels.

— File and win lawsuits to allow regulation of CO2 and other carbon GHG’s as pollutants under the Clean Air Act.
— Publish a CAA Section 202 Endangerment Finding as a prototype test case for regulation of carbon GHG’s.
— Defend the Section 202 Endangerment Finding in the courts.

Phase II: Expand and extend EPA regulation of carbon GHG’s to all major sources of America’s carbon emissions. (2021-2022)

— Issue a presidential executive order declaring a carbon pollution emergency.
— Publish a CAA Section 108 Endangerment Finding which complements 2009’s Section 202 finding.
— Establish a National Ambient Air Quality Standard (NAAQS) for carbon pollution.
— Use the NAAQS for carbon pollution as America’s tie-in to international climate change agreements.
— Defend the Section 108 Endangerment Finding and the NAAQS in the courts.

— Publish a regulatory framework for carbon pollution under Clean Air Act sections 108, 111, 202, and other CAA sections as applicable.
— Establish cooperative agreements with the states to enforce the EPA’s anti-carbon regulations.
— Establish a system of carbon pollution fines which is the functional equivalent of a legislated tax on carbon.
— Establish the legal basis for assigning all revenues collected from these carbon pollution fines to the states.
— Research and publish a provisional system of direct carbon fuel rationing as a backup to the carbon fine system.
— Defend the EPA’s comprehensive system of carbon pollution regulations in the courts.

— Commence operation of prior agreements with the states for enforcement of the EPA’s anti-carbon regulations.
— Commence the collection of carbon pollution fines and the distribution of fine revenues to the states.
— Monitor the effectiveness of the EPA’s carbon regulatory framework in reducing America’s GHG emissions.
— Monitor the effectiveness of renewable energy projects in reducing America’s GHG emissions.
— Monitor the effectiveness of energy conservation programs in reducing America’s GHG emissions.
— Adjust the schedule of carbon pollution fines upward if progress in reducing America’s GHG emissions lags.
— Assess the possible need for invoking the provisional system of direct carbon fuel rationing.
— Defend the EPA’s system of carbon pollution regulations against emerging lawsuits.

Phase V: Implement the provisional system for direct carbon fuel rationing. (Start and End dates contingent upon Phase IV progress.)

— Issue a presidential proclamation declaring that Phase IV anti-carbon measures cannot meet the 80% by 2050 target.
— Initiate the provisionally established system for imposing direct government control over production and distribution of all carbon fuels.
— Apply the Phase IV system of carbon pollution fines in escalating steps as needed to incentivize Phase V compliance.
— Defend the government-mandated carbon fuel rationing program in the courts.

— Assess the need for continuing the EPA’s anti-carbon regulations and the US Government’s mandatory fuel rationing program beyond 2050.
— Defend the government’s anti-carbon measures against emerging lawsuits if these measures continue beyond 2050.

Remarks:

Phase I of this plan was complete in 2012. The legal foundation needed to impose aggressive across-the-board regulation of all major sources of America’s carbon emissions remains in place awaiting the appearance of a president willing to use it.

When Barack Obama was Chief Executive, his Clean Power Plan and his other anti-carbon measures might have achieved possibly one-third of his Year 2050 GHG reduction goal. But the remainder depended upon a highly uncertain combination of accelerated technological advancements and raw unvarnished hope.

And yet, when President Obama had the opportunity and the means to move forward with the 350.org plan, he refused to go through with it. Nor were 350.org itself and the other climate activist groups willing to push hard for adoption of their 2009 plan after their initial victories in the courts.

From 2012 onward, climate activists could have worked closely with the EPA using the ‘sue and settle’ process to put their 2009 plan into effect. If the dangers of climate change are as severe as they claim, then why didn’t the activists go forward with it?

Could it be that in 2012, President Obama, 350.org, and all the other anti-carbon environmental groups were afraid of massive political blowback if they had pushed for a program which can be highly effective in quickly reducing America’s carbon emissions — but at the expense of imposing great personal and economic sacrifice on most Americans?

We do not need a plan to reduce GHG emissions, especially government mandated. What we do need is a community action plan to reduce all particulate pollutions (the black smoke you see coming out of diesel trucks, diesel driven engines of all sorts, and factories). By doing so you might also reduce some CO2 emissions. The first smacks of a ‘5-year Soviet plan’ as one House member so eloquently stated.

Beta Blocker – thank you for posting that. The 350.org plan illustrates a far more existential threat to America than climate change and is rarely part of the climate discussion, namely the organized effort to place increasing amounts of power in the Federal executive and judicial branches of our system of representative democracy.

Looking at it from a systemic lens regarding our brilliant system of checks and balances one can view each of the phases.

Phase 1 – Rather than using elected representatives of the people to make law as it is enumerated in the US Constitution, appeal to those with lifetime appointments to the judicial branch to interpret an existing law to reach our objective of a new law. It is more expedient.

Phase 2 – With our new law, use the executive branch to implement and expand the enforcement of it under emergency powers granted to the executive branch. As an aside, I wonder how Bill McKibbon feels about Trump using emergency powers on immigration.

Phase 3 – Avoid the Constitutional requirement that taxes be assessed by Congress by having the Executive branch (under the powers the court granted it) issue fines rather than taxes and then co-opt the States by bribing them with fine-sharing scheme to avoid any issues of States Rights enumerated in the Constitution.

Phase 4 – More of Phase 3, except the explicit use of the courts to defend the new powers of the Executive and increase the funding pool to consolidate this power and co-opt State cooperation.

Phase 5 – This is the jewel. When the goals aren’t reached, nationalize the energy sector using “presidential proclamation”. Again – use the pool of funds to keep the courts on board.

Phase 6 – Our work is done – we have completely subverted American Democracy. We have a king who has appointed kangaroo court judges for life who rubber stamp the kings edicts. No Congress needed. It’s so much easier than changing the Constitution or using representative democracy. All those little people who are too dumb to understand that they are better off for what we have done are too myopic to vote the right way. Our ends are so pure and we have such a superior understanding of complex systems like climate and economics and human nature and sociology that the means we use are imminently justified.

How an educated person cannot see the dangers this presents is such a mystery I despair for my children and theirs and theirs. The audacity of Bill McKibbon (who is head of Environmental Studies at my alma mater) to actually publish it is even more striking.

Thank you for the post and thanks to Judith Curry for giving me hope some scientists can stick to science and out of the activism business to make America sane again.

Anthony, please see my response to Dave Fair’s question below. He asks if my proposal is serious. My response to his question is that yes, not only is the proposal serious, it is brutally serious. My response then goes on to explain why.

Well, Beta, I don’t appreciate people who want to be brutal with me (or my children) for the greater good. There is a long list of people who were brutal in their pursuit of ideas of what is good for others. Provide your own version of the list.

Dave, in the Clean Air Act and in the CAA enforcement mechanisms managed by the EPA through its partnerships with the states, and in existing national security law — all of it legislated by the Congress over the past forty to fifty years and tested in the courts — climate activists now have the constitutionally legal means needed to go as far and as fast as they might want to go in driving down America’s GHG emissions,

If the dangers of climate change are as severe as they claim; and if as they claim there exists clear evidence that quick reductions in America’s GHG emissions will help solve the larger worldwide problem, then America’s climate activists have a clear moral obligation to use every tool at their command to force those GHG reductions as quickly as possible, and regardless of the consequences for our economy and for our personal lifestyles. Do climate activists have enough courage of conviction to do what their own moral imperative demands of them?

Kim Cobb: “the data and the science could not be more clear.” It’s true, but the data and science falsify Kim’s hypothesis. Examples: peer-reviewed paper: “The analysis results invalidate EPA’s CO2 Endangerment Finding, including the climate models that EPA has claimed can be relied upon for policy analysis purposes. Moreover, these research results clearly demonstrate that once the solar, volcanic and oceanic activity, that is, natural factor, impacts on temperature data are accounted for, there is no “record setting” warming to be concerned about.”

On the Existence of a “Tropical Hot Spot”& The Validity of EPA’s CO2 Endangerment Finding. Abridged Research Report. Second Edition. Link to the updated second edition of this peer-reviewed paper, along with a link to the press release that went out with it.

“…Atmospheric CO2 concentration is correlated weakly but negatively with linearly-detrended T proxies over the last 425 million years. Of 68 correlation coefficients (half non-parametric) between CO2 and T proxies encompassing all known major Phanerozoic climate transitions, 77.9% are non-discernible (p > 0.05) and 60.0% of discernible correlations are negative. … This study demonstrates that changes in atmospheric CO2 concentration did not cause temperature change in the ancient climate.”…“The absence of a discernible correlation between atmospheric CO2 concentration and T over most of the Phanerozoic, as demonstrated above, appears to contravene the widely-accepted view about the relationship between atmospheric CO2 and temperature, by which increases in atmospheric CO2 concentration cause corresponding increases in T owing to increased radiative forcing.” …“The principal findings of this study are that neither the atmospheric concentration of CO2 nor ΔRFCO2 is correlated with T over most of the ancient (Phanerozoic) climate. Over all major climate transitions of the Phanerozoic Eon, about three-quarters of 136 correlation coefficients computed here between T and atmospheric CO2 concentration, and between T and ΔRFCO2, are non-discernible, and about half of the discernible correlations are negative. Correlation does not imply causality, but the absence of correlation proves conclusively the absence of causality [63]. The finding that atmospheric CO2 concentration and ΔRFCO2 are generally uncorrelated with T, therefore, implies either that neither variable exerted significant causal influence on T during the Phanerozoic Eon or that the underlying proxy databases do not accurately reflect the variables evaluated.” The Relationship between Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide Concentration and Global Temperature for the Last 425 Million Years. W. Jackson Davis 1,2

Beta Blocker, if yours is a serious proposal you are absolutely delusional if you think the Congress of the U.S. is going to let one Executive Agency fundamentally alter our society, economy and energy systems. If you are saying it won’t work politically, I agree.

Dave Fair:“Beta Blocker, if yours is a serious proposal you are absolutely delusional if you think the Congress of the U.S. is going to let one Executive Agency fundamentally alter our society, economy and energy systems. If you are saying it won’t work politically, I agree.”

Dave, of course the proposal for aggressive application of the Clean Air Act to the problem of America’s GHG emissions is completely serious. Brutally serious, in fact,

If climate activists are truly committed to achieving an 80% reduction in America’s GHG emissions by 2050, they must bring the full weight of the federal government’s anti-carbon regulatory powers to bear against the problem.

A program of massive green energy spending enacted by Congress cannot get us from here to there anywhere nearly as fast as the activists say is necessary. For any of these activists to be claiming otherwise is simply to be pushing a flat out lie.

If making quick reductions in America’s GHG emissions is in fact the green activist’s first and most important priority, they cannot get from here to there by relying mostly on a program of massive government spending enacted by Congress.

By law and by past practice, the EPA and the Clean Air Act are the public policy means through which substances identified as dangerous pollutants are managed and eventually reduced.

Since CO2 and other carbon compounds have already been identified by the EPA as pollutants which are subject to regulation under the Clean Air Act, then assigning primary responsibility for the federal government’s overall anti-carbon plan of action to the Executive Branch and to the EPA is the most logical public policy approach to be taken.

It is also the approach most likely to succeed, but with one very important caveat.

A truly robust public debate concerning the validity of today’s mainstream climate science hasn’t yet occurred. The debate we’ve seen so far occurs mostly in the backstreet alleys of the Internet.

Since few are being asked to make any kind of real sacrifice in the name of fighting climate change, no incentives exist for most people to question what mainstream climate scientists say about it.

However, applying the full regulatory power of the federal government against carbon emissions in ways that involve significant disruptions in the daily lives of most working Americans will change that situation considerably, causing the public debate over climate change to go critical mass.

If the public debate over what to do about climate change ever does go critical mass, then climate activists must be ready, willing, and able to defend their science and their policy objectives to an extent they’ve never had to do before.

Will they, or will they not, step up to the responsibilities that an honest and sincere concern about climate change demands of them?

The US is currently producing more oil/gas than Saudi Arabia and Russia and the economy of the US (and indeed the world) is benefiting from this fossil fuel largess.

Low energy prices are good news for everybody. Hopefully the climate circus will be confined to congressional hearings and a few climate blogs and as no climate catastrophe occurs the climate scare will go the way of Y2K and the Ebola panic.

…the predication of government, and United Nations’, policy for energy growth on the unsustainable myth of global warming is a serious threat to us all, but especially to the 1.6 billion people in the less-developed world who have no access to any modern form of energy. The twin curses of water poverty and energy poverty remain the real scandals. By contrast, the political imposition on the rest of the world of our Northern, self-indulgent ecochondria about global warming could prove to be a neocolonialism too far. (Philip Stott)

The ecochondriacs of the Left with their demonization of the business of living, capitalism, had proven to be a betrayal of Americanism– a liberal prejudice against the power of individual liberty and the right of all to personal freedom… a modern era example of man’s inhumanity to man, all blessed by insular, superstitious, secular socialist Western academics…

There’s no such thing as liberal prejudice against the power of the individual, because liberalism by definition means embracing personal liberty, freedom. 18th century classical liberalism is the trunk of the political ideological tree in the US; its foundation represents individual liberty. All other political ideology sprung from it, and yes this includes US conservatism. I only make this distinction because contemporary society intentionally obfuscates historical context; without etymology there’s no meaning. If there’s prejudice to individual liberty, it’s not represented by liberalism; but perhaps progressivism, socialism, fascism, etc. For those on the contemporary Left who despise individualism, they fully embrace being called liberals because this would mean they successfully blurred the lines.

““Unlike classical liberalism, which saw the government as a necessary evil, or simply a benign but voluntary social contract for free men to enter into willingly, the belief that the entire society was one organic whole left no room for those who didn’t want to behave, let alone ‘evolve’.”
~Jonah Goldberg

Wagathon, your quote by Jonah is him referencing a bit of historical context, in essence the point where progressivism broke away from classical liberal moorings. Classical liberalism went out of favor in the late 19th century, from this it evolved in the US to i.e., social Neo-liberalism, progressivism, conservatism; the latter by definition embracing classical liberal tenets. “…classical liberalism, which saw the government as a necessary evil” implicitly refers to the empowerment and liberty of the individual, thus government was seen as a necessary evil; not “liberal prejudice against the power of the individual”; this refers to progressivism which was inspired by Mussolini’s Fascist Italy. Indeed the contextual quote from Jonah you post deals with attitudes that began the progressive movement and its enamorment with Italian Fascism. It came from his book “Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left from Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning”. I concede that while the beginning period of progressivism some did have sympathetic roots for liberal values, that was then when progressivism was fresh. Many in todays Left have no liberal underpinnings, which factually is ideology empowering the individual and liberty. Even social Neo-liberals are becoming a dying breed, people like Alan Dershowitz who has strong social libertarian views. We’re seeing a dawning of US fascism, which ironically reverts to visions and proclamations that were described during the progressive era, during a period just following the New Deal, when there was a strong sympathetic appeal for fascism.

That would be an inaccuracy, but US founding roots are indeed classical liberal, this including: social Neo-liberalism, conservatism, libertarianism. It doesn’t include socialists, communists, fascists.

“John Locke and Liberalism. Locke believed that people had natural rights to “life, liberty, and property”, and that the role of government was to preserve these rights. If a government does not preserve these rights, then the people have a right to change their government.” (~Foundation, Univ. of Nebraska)

In the context of the humanistic philosophy that motivated the founders, the anti-Americanism modern-day Leftist-liberalism — as opposed to tea party conservatives and ‘refuse to state’ independents who have problems with both mainstream political parties (the productive who provide value to society and who pay all the bills) — I think it’s fair to say that individual liberty and personal responsibility and quaint notions of honor, integrity and fidelity to honesty and objective truth with a respect for the lessons of history, are all in the crosshairs of the liberal Democrats.

Global Warming is a Left vs right debate– it’s political, not science… it’s a battle between Liberal Fascism and Americanism. “Liberals claim to want to give a hearing to other views, but then are shocked and offended to discover that there are other views.” ~Wm F. Buckley, Jr.

Wagathon, were not far removed in our thinking, semantics really. When Jonah wrote his book “Liberal Fascism,…” the degrees of separation between “Leftist-liberalism” and Leftist-progressive was more narrow, but as the ideological divide has unquestionably increased, exponentially since the days of FDR, progressivism has completely detached from liberal moorings centered on the liberty and protections of the individual and liberty, those ideals of which liberals embrace, including conservatism which came about as a sympathetic response for classical liberalism in the early 20th century.

You ought to review the debate between William F Buckley, Jr. and McGovern in 1997. You will be astonished how far the ideological divide has come in just 20 odd years. McGovern even acknowledges the importance of conservatism in the debate. Do you believe there’s a vestige of these types of gracious thoughts in todays Left? These sorts of sensibilities are gone with progressives.

Frankly I argue that progressivism has basically strong armed the liberal left to near extinction. The last stronghold of liberalism can be found within the classical liberal right, within conservatism, but there’s still a sizable number of the neo liberal left trying to hang on, but with little voice. Progressivism has gone full tilt socialist, they’re collectivists, they’re not any form of liberal.

Though neo liberalism and progressivism share a point of demarcation from classical liberalism in the early 20th century, I consider progressivism to be far removed from any form of liberalism today; perhaps this is where we depart in our thinking. I have to believe Jonah has reformulated some of his thinking since the day he wrote his book. “Liberal fascism” is a bit of an oxymoron, almost like calling a former catholic who becomes an atheist a “catholic atheist”. Liberalism essentially is a belief system, both left and right of it, that is centered on the empowerment of the individual; fascism is a belief system that supports the power of the collective, the state.

You could say that all the Founders were liberals; and, that all Leftists are liberals… many of whom do not believe in the Bill of Rights or Ten Commandments– the Liberal Fascists.

If the election of Obama – and reelection, the hoax and scare tactic of global warming alarmism and abnegation by academia of the scientific method, a Socialist-Democrat party fix for Hillary and allegations of Trump/ Russia collusion prove anything – it’s that the Left is not interested in preventing a collapse of Western Civilization.

It’s not that “you could say”, the founders were liberals; but they were classical liberals. Classical liberalism is the trunk of the tree for all political ideology in the US, including conservatism which wasn’t coined until the 19th century as a way of defining a defining a desire for an earlier political dogma. Classical liberalism fell out of favor in the late 19th century, and was coined “classical” then to distinguish it from neo liberalism, today simply called liberal; so ironically while it goes by the same name as in the 18th century, it’s completely different in that it only has derivative sympathies to classical liberalism; conservatism ironically is more closely aligned to the early tenets of U.S. classical liberalism, it’s a fallback to earlier political dogma of the American experience.

The 19th century was a period of political experimentation that’s bewildering to follow. A Jefferson Republican was a forerunner belonging to the Democratic Party, go figure.

Neo liberalism isn’t synonymous with classical liberalism. Progressivism is a break from neo liberal, it’s roots are sympathetic to fascism, this is what Jonah refers to. It’s astonishing that this history is lost. It requires a true beat down on any Leftists delusional ideas that fascism was born out of socialist ideology.

The dawning of the U.S. progressive movement in the early 20th century was likened to the well oiled political machinations of Italy’s Fascism. Most aren’t aware that FDR even exchanged niceties with both Hitler and Mussolini over the promise of fascism. FDR called Mussolini “admirable”. Mussolini returned the compliment, writing of FDR’s reforms, “Reminiscent of Fascism is the principle that the state no longer leaves the economy to its own devices … Without question, the mood accompanying this sea change resembles that of Fascism.” FDR adviser Rexford Guy Tugwell said of Italian fascism: “It’s the cleanest, neatest, most efficiently operating piece of social machinery I’ve ever seen. It makes me envious,” adding that, “I find Italy doing many of the things which seem to me necessary … Mussolini certainly has the same people opposed to him as FDR has.” I could go on, but to keep this succinct; many U.S. Leftist elites embraced Fascism before there was a sense war was looming as a consequence of it; the Left then did cartwheels to distance themselves from Fascism, they then purposefully began redirecting the label, JCH is testimony to their success.

An early 20th century six-time presidential candidate for the Socialist Party of America, Norman Thomas, once stated: “Fascism is coming in the United States most probably, but it will not come under that name.” He was repeating the words of the late Huey Long, a left of FDR populist, Huey’s statement: “Of course we’ll have it. We’ll have it under the guise of anti-fascism.” Antifa comes to mind.

Conservatism became, while not prominent at the time, a movement in reaction the splintering of liberalism, pure classical liberal types moved into the newly minted Republican party when its first president, Abe, became president. Conservatism took on the lexicon soon after to distinguish between classical liberalism, and neo liberalism.

Conservatism was coined after the French revolution as a sympathetic lament for an earlier monarchy. The Tories soon picked up the term for the same reasons, circa 1825. So when classical liberals in the GOP picked it up late in the century, it represented a lament for the early political dogma of classical liberalism that was established in the framework of the Constitution and Bill of Rights. Conservatism further grew in response to FDR’s New Deal. Progressives and social neo-liberals were moving away from the founding principles of classical liberalism, which is why “classical” was added to the lexicon, as consequence to it falling out of favor in the late 19th century; it was this classical liberalism that conservatism embraced.

Very importantly, progressivism literally grew out of a complete rejection for all forms of liberalism; in fact its very mission was to stamp out all forms of liberalism. It’s sympathies were with Italian Fascism, a socialistic experiment. Today’s ideologies are convoluted because there’s very little moorings in contemporary culture that understands civics, or much of anything about the founding of the nation. This is intentional, it’s not taught for a reason.

cerescokid, I agree. I would say sociology plays a larger role than ideology in the contemporary political landscape. Political ideology has become completely convoluted, “a mess”, only understood by the curious minded who care to understand the why for philosophical underpinnings of ideology, including historical context. Today people get their center from tribes; these tribes are centered on pop culture phenomena, all which is influenced by well organized elitist puppeteers, inclusive of media and intellectual elites who think they’re in the know. Some of the latter understand the end game but otherwise, at least those bobbleheads who are in powerful positions, are driven by inspirational determination to be seen approvingly by their peers as an influential team player. The elites know the strings to pull to direct the unassuming masses who’ve been conditioned through a purposeful lack of education except for the necessary programming required to direct their attention to who they must listen to.

Bottom line, all the “isms” boil down to two essential ideological approaches to governance that are based on either individualism, or collectivism. All variants of the collectivist approach has led to somewhere around 265 million people being killed, starved and tortured in the 20th century. U.S. bobbleheads and globalist ilk still think they can make it work, they make every excuse in the world and come up with every concoction, say like CAGW, to drive the masses in the desired direction. These people who talk about risks are oblivious to those they create.

Agreed! Africa and rural India are probably next in line to make it through the demographic transition! Hopefully, the successes AND failures of energy applications in the developed world will inform their progress…Chinese coal plants for everyone!

And is currently a lot cheaper in Asia, Africa and Oceania. I expect that to change within a decade.

“To provide electricity in today’s world, an ‘advanced reactor’ must improve over existing reactors in the following 4-core objectives. It must produce significantly less costly, cost-competitive clean electricity, be safer, produce significantly less waste and reduce proliferation risk. It is not sufficient to excel at one without regard to the others.” Dr. Christina Back, Vice President, Nuclear Technologies and Materials for General Atomics, May 2016 testimony before the US Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee hearing on the status of advanced nuclear technologies.

Modern materials science and nuclear fuel cycles brings decades old nuclear technology into the 21st century. Several of these new designs are likely to be cost competitive. Due to the high fuel utilisation, heat conversion efficiency, small modular design and factory fabrication. By all means let’s avoid the folly of subsidising energy of any sort. The future of nuclear fuels seems quite likely to be focused on fuel recycling and re-fabrication rather than mining and geological storage. The new designs are cheap, safe, reduce both the volume and half-life of waste and considerably reduce the potential for weapons proliferation.

“China’s new coal-fired power plants are cleaner than anything operating in the United States.
China’s emissions standards for conventional air pollutants from coal-fired power plants are stricter than the comparable U.S. standards.”

The point is, this is changing very fast, at least the pollution from the electricity sector. Even the existing (older) plants now have to comply with the pollution standards higher than the EU or US ones. There still may be some cheating though, but not much and it will decrease.

“On the other hand, Chinese citizens are demanding cleaner air, and they want immediate improvements. Air quality is now a political priority for the Chinese Communist Party on par with economic growth and corruption. This means that China cannot continue to run the same high-pollution coal plants that were considered acceptable decades ago. Beijing’s solution is to move full speed ahead with renewables while simultaneously investing in what may become the most efficient, least polluting coal fleet the world has ever seen.”

There is cheap natural gas in the US, so of course new coal plants are not that interesting. However, it would still be smart to build some advanced coal plants to mix it up a bit.

Considering how bad catastrophic climate change effects COULD be (accommodating for uncertainty), should the precautionary principle be applied, or are we will to roll the dice? What is the responsible choice for our future generations (of Republican children as well)? Just trying to wrap my head around this…

Should the precautionary principle be applied when the problem is not understood, the gain is not know, the damage caused by the application of the proposed fixes are well known and horrible. Energy generation not reliable and not affordable. NO, DO NOT APPLY THE PRECAUTIONARY PRINCIPLE, IT WILL RUIN US LIKE IT ALREADY HAS RUINED OTHER COUNTRIES.

Exactly! Short-term gain vs. long-term sustainability is such a conundrum, though I don’t know exactly what the “well known and horrible” effects of transitioning to renewables is. Can you share a link? I know as battery technology increases, wind and solar are becoming more dependable and some people put so much faith in human ingenuity that a 10-year transition appears plausible. Others cite subsidies for fossil fuels as evidence that the market is skewed towards oil/coal/natural gas. Who knows what trends we’d see if the markets were an even playing field?? Lastly, what other countries have been ruined by the precautionary principle? Really curious… Thanks!

So the problem with the precautionary principle is that it cuts both ways; What are not doing instead of mitigating climate change that you could be if you weren’t? You weigh the merits of a possible outcome in the future (deleterious climate change) which is highly uncertain, against a certain outcome now, such as access to clean drinking water, or perhaps more pertinently vulnerability to extreme weather events.

The other problem is how far do you go? If you apply the precautionary principle to one thing, say climate change, then you could apply it to anything, say driving cars (you could have a car accident). Or vaccines….

The precautionary principle isn’t a good way to think about risk. Then there is also the issue that climate change is not necessarily all bad. I think the whole argument and debate in the mainstream lacks nuance and correct information to guide it. It takes people like Dr Curry to stand up and help people try to think about the issue of climate change holistically. It must be so tough….she’s a hero in my opinion. A true scientist.

Great thoughts, thanks! I know one wouldn’t apply the precautionary principle to, say, leaving the house (“I might get hit by a meteor, so it’s best I stay inside”), but the arguments I’ve heard validate its use (again, in response to percent error/uncertainty) due to the scale of potential bad due to global warming.

Great call, too, about the mainstream being misinformed. So true. Unless they’re going to the primary research and understanding the validity of peer-reviewed science, they’re allowing confirmation bias to truly cloud their perspective. “Trust” in the IPCC report is dependent on one’s understanding and faith in the scientific process and the validity of empirical data, gathered from 1000s of scientists. Dr. Curry is certainly carving out her niche with her voice!

The key thing about the PP is that there could be huge impacts either way. So if there are huge impacts and we WEREN’T responsible for them, then what we are doing to mitigate could imperil our ability to manage them when they come and we could be trying to mitigate against the wrong thing. It doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t consider our impact on the planet, it just means we need to take a balanced view. JC talks about making society robust and resilient to climate changes – and this is the way to think about it in my view. Adaption rather than mitigation. And her comment regarding deploying 20th C solutions to a 21st C problem and thus missing possible 21st C solutions is RIGHT on point – I couldn’t agree more.

An excellent example is allowing people to build on flood plains and then point to manmade climate change when they flood. The PP leads to arguments to mitigate against impacts they happen anyway and put peoples lives and property at risk. Far better to ensure you either don’t build on plains, or you create appropriate infrastructure to cope with extreme flooding events.

Final point – I don’t know of many skeptics who don’t think society shouldn’t be moving away from fossil fuels. It’s just that renewable tech such as it is will never meet the energy needs of 9 billion people we are projected to be around 2050. But there are alternatives, small scale nuclear fusion, thorium fission, even 4th gen uranium fission. Anyone who thinks renewables will be able to cut it in the future just hasn’t done their sums. this side of the debate is even more devoid of reality sadly

Agnostic- thanks for the thoughtful ideas (2/8/19, 11:21 a.m. time stamp). Seriously. I guess if societies can become resilient to POTENTIAL rising sea levels, the loss global climate moderators (deep ocean circulation, gulf stream slow/shutdown, the displacement of millions of people seeking food and water), I’m all for 21st century solutions (that can only come through continued use of fossil fuels?).

The floodplain idea is a great analogy. To play devil’s advocate, it could be seen in a different light: people were encouraged to build a house on land by a developer, the developer learned of the flooding risk, didn’t tell the builders/owners, denied floods could occur, and when flooding does start, owners can decide to either intervene immediately to save your house OR allow your basement to get a bit wet, hoping for some abstract future solution to come all the while the developer continues to sell lots in other floodplains.

Too late. We are married to fossil fuels. Exxon and Shell have profited from our energy use. The basement is said to be leaking by 1000s of IPCC scientists and we have to decide what kind of effort are we going to put in and whether or not we believe there’s more flooding coming. If not, hold on and get the wet vac and replace the carpet. If more is coming, desperate times call for desperate measures and the proponents of the Green New Deal have their platform.

Bad analogy, Eric. There is no water in our basements. Your “The basement is said to be leaking by 1000s of IPCC scientists …” is nothing more than speculation by those facing unemployment without such speculation.

There are numerous studies indicating the current climate is no worse than that of past climate states. CAGW is supported only by unreliable, unverified UN IPCC climate models. Please read any of the many critiques of UN IPCC AR5 CMIP5 models.

The precautionary principle doesn’t apply at all. Even if we assume that the disease is real, the proposed cure is ineffective and very expensive. Furthermore, it won’t be even applied at the end. It’s just “talking the talk”.

“Negotiators in Paris are trying to tackle global warming in the same way that has failed for 30 years: by making promises that are individually expensive, will have little impact even in a hundred years and that many governments will try to shirk from.
This didn’t work in Kyoto, it didn’t work in Copenhagen, it hasn’t worked in the 18 other climate conferences or countless more international gatherings. The suggestion that it will make a large difference in Paris is wishful thinking.”https://www.lomborg.com/press-release-research-reveals-negligible-impact-of-paris-climate-promises

It puzzles me that people don’t quote the actual energy data from the EU based IEA. Here Lomborg shows that the S&Wind idiocy doesn’t add up to a row of beans, yet we still have silly scientists, the media and ignorant pollies pushing this nonsense. When will people discuss the actual data from the IEA?

Here’s the link and projections out to 2040, anyone not see a problem? How many trillions $ do they want to waste for a guaranteed ZERO return? Oh and the Royal Society/ NAS report also claims that we could stop all human co2 emissions today and we wouldn’t see a change in temp for a thousand years and co2 levels wouldn’t fall for many more thousands of years. So much for the alarmist’s science and Nic Lewis thinks that they are far too pessimistic and temps should begin to fall much earlier, but co2 levels would take a long time to begin to fall.

Don’t forget that’s if we STOPPED ALL co2 emissions today. IOW a zero chance scenario. Here’s Lomborg’s summary of the IEA data and projections to 2040.

Yes. I’m not sure how we WOULD stop all CO2 emissions immediately or what any kind of transition would actually look like. Lomborg is such a master in his efforts to undermine the IPCC reports…such a source!

“No regrets”.
That’s funny 😂 .
Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge had no regrets either. Their approach to emissions reduction would no doubt be praised by today’s SJWs, the new Khmer Vert.
What maniacal psychopath ever has regrets??

Yes, please don’t stop. I have been following you since you were at Tech. IMHO, your comments here and at the hearing were well grounded. On the other hand, I found Kim Cobb’s comments dripped with rhetoric. David Packard taught me that ‘no regrets’ does not work. We learn from our mistakes, most of us anyway. Like Lindzen, Happer and many others these days, compared to their past more moderate statements, you and all of us have to get off the fence of moderation and instead tell people what is really going on in this debate. AGW is not about climate science. Rhetoric, fence sitting and caution interferes with realization. As you know, it is much more difficult to unlearn something.

Received 18 December 2018, Revised 21 December 2018, Accepted 21 December 2018, Available online 6 January 2019.

What kind of peer-review is this? Is this Chinese journal a joke? How much can we trust this “science”?

There is a serious problem with scientific publishing when the main editorials are sponsoring what is an expanding grey area between legitimate journals and predatory journals. Scientific editorials are making ton loads of money from taxpayers without contributing anything of value to science.

Why do we bother? Because we know that sooner or later sense floats to the surface. The saying in Brazil is that if water drips onto a hard stone long enough, it will make a dent then a hole.
If, after 10 years and a few volcanoes, there is no major climate problem the more vocal tribespeople will simply move onto a new bandwagon. The folk I feel sorry for are the climate scientists who have spent many years of their lives on warming & will suddenly find funding has dried up. A bit like going to the moon. Once there, the public and TV lost interest and a lot of guys found themselves out of work.

I heard that a 2.5% error is within scientifically considered significance range (per Curious George’s comment). Has anyone looked at this portal for information to supplement the WUWT site?: http://www.realclimate.org/

So many people I hear criticize Anthony Watts for being a meteorologist and not a climate scientist, which is an interesting criticism. Too bad he’s part of the Heartland Institute, which puts another perception of bias on his blogging efforts.

It’s hard to tell what’s true and what is just cherry-picked biased information…

LOL. It seems like their funding is infinite! There’s always more data they find to spur further research! Think of the vast topics they cover besides the increasing intensity of natural disasters! Black carbon on glaciers, the projected loss of Himalayan snowpack, the erosion of the Antarctic ice shelves, the ratio of “new” vs. “old” carbon isotopes in the stratosphere, methane leaks from fracking, let alone the decreasing pH of the ocean! If science is a tribe, they’re definitely well-funded!

That certainly has been the attitude for decades and perhaps with good reason. If inflation and Real Growth in Gross Income monetize the Debt Held by the Public (Debt)in the future, then the Debt Service in a few decades will not be not a problem. But since 2000 we’ve entered a new age. No one seems to notice.
In 1945, after the massive Debt incurred in WWII, the Debt was 2 times Gross Income. However, in the next 50+ years inflation and Real Growth in Gross Income were each over 3% and the Debt and Interest on the Debt could be accommodated. However, since 2000 Growth in Gross Income collapsed. Between 1948 and 2000 there was not a single year where Gross Income was either below or virtually at the level of a previous year. Since 2000, that has happened for 9 years. The tax base stopped growing. The Gross Income is now being overwhelmed by growth of the Debt. Even after the great buildup of Debt under Reagan, Gross Income was larger than Debt, and Real Growth in Income exceeded 5% for several years.
The 2016 Gross Income, per IRS, was $10.2 Trillion. Estimate for now is ~$10.6-10.8 Trillion. Today, Debt ( Debt Held by the Public) is $16.2 Trillion. That ratio is not as great as the post war level of 2 to 1 yet, but with deficits at $800 Billion + for the next few years, we are approaching that ratio.
The difference between the post WWII ability to grow out of Debt and now is that we have inflation at 2% and Real Growth of Income averaging 1% since 2000.
The Interest on the Debt for FY 2020 is estimated at $446 Billion. That amount is greater than the COMBINED spending on the following Departments and Programs:
EPA
NASA
Education
Energy
Commerce
Forest Service
Interior
Justice including FBI
Judiciary
Legislative Branch
Transportation
Social Security Administration (ex SS Payments)
HUD
Treasury
Labor
State
CIA
SBA
Peace Corps
FTC
FCC
NRC
OMB
FEMA
National Endowment for the Arts
If the nominal growth in Gross Income from 1945 to today had been at the same rate as it has been since 2000, the US median Household Income would have been ~$20,000 instead of the current $61,000.

That possibility of stagnant growth in income for the next few generations poses a greater threat to the sustainability of our welfare and standard of living than any of the AGW scenarios.

In spite of this economic outlook, we still have politicians like AOC dreaming up feel good Programs and Freebies for All as if it was 1945 and we had Growth in incomes projected far into the future which increased Adjusted Gross Income from $120 Billion to the current $10 Trillion +.

Good, thoughtful stuff here. I’ve had discussions where people cite this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JrJJxn-gCdo to explain the global warming data collection; NASA models are explained and dissected a bit (it’s a short TED Talk). It’s an interesting watch, but I’m sure Dr. Curry would have some insight!

It is frustrating that even small steps on energy research or nuclear power or conversion to natural gas seem to be so difficult to get done. Adaptation is another obvious action that seems to get lost. I do agree that the current “debate” is highly political and also that the science “communication” strategy of activist scientists and their political hack supposed supporters (including the media) has failed. The public I think is suffering from extreme crisis fatigue. The constant exploitation of and gross exaggeration of every negative event in the media and by activists has backfired. Well done!! A textbook case of how to guarantee failure.

Just a reminder about context.
Congress has been presented by the least serious climate change legislation proposal in the history of climate advocacy- the Green New Deal.
A proposal so silly that both Trump and Nancy Pelosi were quoted making fun of it yesterday.
At least it finds common ground- Senators James Inhofe and Bernie Sanders both want it to be the Democrats’ highest priority.
My favorite part about it- the goal of providing federal jobs to install solar panels also insists on economic security for people “unwilling to work”- we’ll pay anyone to install solar panels, or pay them not to, up to them.

It truly is an amazing intersection of FDR’s legacy with the perceived need for energy-use overhaul, keeping economic growth/job security/public health/global sustainability at the forefront. An ostentatious assumption that America has the willingness or capability to embark on such a journey (unless one believes in the threat of GW)!

Pelosi certainly didn’t like AOC (freshman) hijacking the agenda, but the Speaker has her own streak of favoring sustainable energy, so I doubt she’ll completely sink the proposal.

Hard to identify who is “unwilling to work” vs. incapable of working (some very generic labels getting thrown around). Economic support for these people (food stamps, unemployment insurance, welfare, etc) is either evidence of how socialistic our country has become or an exercise in compassion. Economic disparity between the rich and poor is probably for another thread, however…

The text of her plan distinguishes between the types of “workers” – it says economic security “for those unable or unwilling to work.”
If you don’t want to install solar panels, she’ll pay you from the solar panel fund to stay home and play video games.

AOC’s proposal is to create new public banks to “lend” the federal government the money to hire over 10 million people to replace nuclear, coal and natural gas electricity generation nationwide.
This is to be done while retrofitting every structure in the US for energy efficiency and banning airplanes and cows.
All to be accomplished in 10 years- though she does concede it may take slightly longer to shutter all of the nuclear power plants.

If you tasked Marc Morano with tricking advocates into supporting a plan so awful that it would guarantee that nobody in the US takes the climate issue seriously for the next decade, he wouldn’t write a plan this bad. It would be just too implausible. Nobody would be that gullible.

Wow, interesting. Thanks for clarifying. I am glad they removed the “unwilling to work” wording from the actual document (here’s where I found the full language (not sure it’s “final” language): https://www.gp.org/gnd_full

Would it actually ban airplanes or replace them with something else? Hard to believe they’re proposing to destroy the US economy without some solution to travel needs…
Bovine methane can be addressed by adding seaweed to their diets, though, so at least we don’t have to give up our steaks!

You citing Marc Morano is exactly the problem with politicians playing scientist! AOC, Bernie, Inhofe, Morano…all try to tell us how things should be, while fighting bias in using scientifically-backed empirical evidence that should govern policy. Putting the agenda before the science is problematic.

She gives the US 10 years to replace airplanes with trains. The progressive US Senator from Hawaii was unimpressed with that idea yesterday.

The point is the plan is so thoughtless, unrealistic, humorously ignorant, and unlikely that serious advocates should be outraged that it’s currently being touted on the front pages of all major newspapers and on CNN.
It makes 30 years of advocacy look just as extremist, partisan and ridiculous as it’s most hyperbolic critics have been saying for years.

That really is a big deal- after three decades of research, climate communication and UN-sponsored position papers for policy-makers, the result is a “bold proposal” wherein the climate concerned declare they have no idea WTF they’re talking about.

I wonder if people thought the same thing when the CCC and TVA were tasked with the scope of their undertakings in 1933? Plant 2 billion trees? Employ 3 million people? Control erosion on 40 million acres? Perhaps also “thoughtless, unrealistic, humorously ignorant and unlikely”! I wish my grandparents were still alive, it’d be interesting to ask.

In conversations I’ve had, the GND has been proposed as the only pathway to get off fossil fuels AND maintain economic/employment growth. But I really don’t know enough to judge whether or not the AOC crowd “knows WTF they’re talking about”.

Ah, yes; a great template, Eric. The 1930’s Civilian Conservation Corps took unemployed men and put them to work on menial labor projects. That’s the same as remaking the U.S. social, economic and energy systems into a progressive/socialist utopia. Add to that a scheme to pay unemployed people not to work!

Ah, yes; another great example. The Tennessee Valley Authority built massive water and electric power projects, channeling and building dams on numerous rivers. [Try to build anything like that now.] Additionally, the beneficiaries of the water and power developments paid for the improvements. Social justice at its best.

Free peoples must be convinced by elected representatives that new schemes will benefit them, Eric. Good luck with the GND.

The TVA was intended for flood control and power generation that actually worked. And it was controversial.
Imagine if the goal of the TVA was to spend billions and turn off the lights nation wide.
This country spends a lot of money on flood control without the GND.

“In conversations I’ve had, the GND has been proposed as the only pathway to get off fossil fuels AND maintain economic/employment growth. ”

Humanity will get off fossil fuels when it makes economic sense.

The GND would seek to kill the greatest factor that has driven the USA’s economic engine over the last several years. Fracking has driven production and the US economic engine in comparison to other nations.

“The Idea of Climate Change should be seen as an intellectual resource around which our collective and personal identities and projects can form and take shape. We need to ask not what we can do for climate change but what climate change can do for us”
“Because the idea of climate change is so plastic, it can be deployed across many of our human projects and can serve many of our psychological, ethical and spiritual needs”
“We will continue to create and tell new stories about climate change and mobilize them in support of our projects”
“These myths transcend the scientific categories of true and false”

The beginning:
The wacky Green New Deal has two features which, taken together, will make it a nightmare for Democrats in the upcoming national elections. First, it is a wonderful wish list of goals the Democrats hold dear. But second, the actions it calls for are impossible. In particular, they would be impossibly expensive, even for tax-and-spend Democrats. The Green New Deal is simply preposterous.

This unholy combination sets up a dilemma for every Democrat candidate, for the Presidency, House or Senate. It may even spill over into Governor and other state races. The problem is that every Democrat candidate will have to declare whether or not they endorse the Green New Deal.

If they do not endorse it, then they will be asked what they have against it? Are they against renewable energy, ending pollution, clean water, good jobs, equity, etc? The Green New Deal is the darling of the radical wing of the Party, which has found a new, loud voice. Anyone who dares to object to it will be criticized severely.

If they do endorse it, then they will be required to defend the indefensible. In particular, how do they intend to pay for it? So far that question has been ducked, but that duck can’t fly forever. The cost is stupendous. Actually it is incalculable because the Green New Deal is physically impossible, but stupendous will do. Their Republican opponents will press this one home.

The mainstream Democrats are now caught between the rock of the radical left and the Republican hard place.

The 2019 version of the Green New Deal is the opening bargaining position of the hard core climate activist wing of the Democratic Party.

It is a push-the-envelope type of proposal offered with the goal of making a big splash which is guaranteed to gets lots of free publicity for green activists and to keep those who are pushing the GND in the headlines The 2019 version also puts the Democrat’s national leadership on notice that the climate activist left is determined to fight for their agenda in the 2020 platform.

At this point in the election cycle, it doesn’t matter how extreme and off-the-wall BSC the 2019 Green New Deal proposal seems. In 2020, the details will be bargained down to something more palatable to centrist Democrats, but still containing an agenda that is more ambitious than what might otherwise have been adopted.

Much more likely than not, the Democrats will be in full control in Washington DC in 2021. They will be enacting massive new spending programs targeting a variety of economic, social, and energy objectives,

How serious the Democrats actually are in reducing America’s GHG emissions as far and as fast as they claim is necessary will be reflected in what approach they choose to take in applying anti-carbon regulations.

If all the Democrats do is revive the Clean Power Plan and reimpose aggressive vehicle mileage standards on the auto industry — while ignoring the broad power the EPA is granted by the Clean Air Act and by the courts for managing a quick transition into a low carbon energy future — If that’s all they choose to do, then it will become obvious they aren’t truly serious about fighting climate change.

If a future democratic administration passes legislation that embraces a substantive portion of the Green New Deal, you better be prepared for a black swan event in the markets; because the markets can’t be propagandized into submission. When middle America’s life time retirement savings accounts start circling the drain, the Left will recognize what true crushing defeat means. Promises of free stuff is all well and good, but when the markets discount fluffy ideology it will make everyone believers that collectivism is to be avoided at all costs.

Good comments, Beta Blocker. One challenge in policy-making is understanding the science used to guide the process: understanding the inherent acceptance of error in experimental data interpretation, the role of peer review, and how bias is (mostly) weeded out.

Trump will have a field day with some of the wackiest ideas. Maybe not immediately, but later, when the public might have forgotten the more bizarre proposals, some even that eventually got dropped, he will remind everyone how far out they were. With his ability at sarcastic humor, the Independents are going to be given a choice, his characterization of socialism or his governing under the tried and true and comfortable feeling of American Capitalism.

Peter Lang-
Besides the nuclear waste issue, I think nuclear has a place at the table for future energy sources, but the start-up cost, finite lifespan of the plant and fear of Fukishima/Chernobyl/Three Mile Island might impede its endorsement by the public. I wish Yucca Mountain would be revisited.

David Fair- The CCC and TVA were pretty darn productive for 8 years before we entered the war.

Interesting ideas here. Seeking unbiased discourse, one has to wade through “wacky”, “nightmare”, “radical”, etc. in this op-ed in order to find substance, but the GND is here as a proposal, so one might as well try to understand what it really is asking. Framing the success of FDR’s New Deal as a “this is what is possible” vision, perhaps there are some components that can promote economic growth, sustain our employment numbers and shift to a carbon neutral society.

My article is about the elections, not the GND (but there is a link at the beginning to my analysis of the GND). The terms wacky, nightmare and radical are carefully chosen for accuracy. I should add that Trump supporters are jubilant, with good reason.

We already have good economic growth and high employment. Shifting to a carbon neutral society is both undesirable and impossible.

Seeking unbiased discourse, one has to wade through “wacky”, “nightmare”, “radical”, etc. in this op-ed in order to find substance, but the GND is here as a proposal, so one might as well try to understand what it really is asking.

Sorry this is O/T but important. Another new study has found that the IPCC’s 2013 (2 metres by 2100) SLR claims are just exaggerated nonsense.
IOW NO SLR apocalypse at all. When will these fra-dsters be held to account?

This is a great example of how science works. As studies are replicated, adjusted and repeated, new data contributes to the body of facts that have empirical support. Peer review filters out most of the bias and, hopefully, policy reflects this insight as to how the world works. While GCC has many “black boxes” where modeling systems have limitations, their usefulness can be evaluated and used or discarded. After all, “What’s the use of having developed a science well enough if, in the end, all we’re willing to do is stand around and wait for them to come true?”- Sherwood Rowland

Dr. Peiser may not be the best messenger, having some bias in his positions, but this is a good example of dynamic science.

Hi Judith.
Nice to make your acquaintance – this may be the first time I’ve posted on your site. I became aware of global warming alarmism in 1985 and have studied it since then, published my first articles in 2002 and remain a skeptic, based on the evidence. A few thoughts follow on the science of climate and energy.
Best personal regards, Allan MacRae

Politicians typically focused on the easy “bird courses” in the social sciences, and skipped the “tough” courses in science and engineering. Here is a primer:

First, this is the economic solution for intermittent green energy – typically wind and solar power:
1. Build your wind or solar power system and connect it to the grid.
2. Build your back-up system consisting of 100% equivalent capacity in gas turbine generators.
3. Using high explosives, blow your wind or solar power system all to hell.
4. Run your back-up gas turbine generators 24/7.
5. To save even more money, skip steps 1 and 3. :-)
Despite many trillions in squandered subsidies, global green energy has increased from above 1% to below 2% is recent decades. Green energy is not green and provides little useful (dispatchable) energy.

Second, fossil fuels comprise fully 85% of global primary energy, unchanged in decades, and unlikely to change in future decades. Ban fossil fuels and ~everyone in the developed world is dead in a month. The remaining 15% of global primary energy is almost all hydro and nuclear.

Third, the only proved “green” solution for global energy is nuclear, but greens hate nuclear more than they hate fossil fuels.

Fourth, atmospheric CO2 is not alarmingly high, it is too low for optimal plant growth and alarmingly low for the survival of carbon-based terrestrial life. Look up “C3 photosynthesis” and “CO2 starvation” during ice ages.

Fifth, even if ALL the observed global warming is ascribed to increasing atmospheric CO2, this calculated MAXIMUM climate sensitivity to a hypothetical doubling of atmospheric CO2 is only about 1 degree C, which is not nearly enough to produce dangerous global warming (Christy and McNider 2017, Lewis and Curry 2018). Climate computer models use much higher ASSUMED values to create false alarm.

Sixth, atmospheric CO2 changes lag global temperature changes at all measured time scales, from ~9 months in the modern data record on a ~3 year natural cycle to ~~800 years in the ice core record, on a much longer time cycle (MacRae 2008, Humlum et al 2013). Rational observers have noted that the future cannot cause the past.

Seventh, CO2 is NOT a major driver of global warming – any warming caused by increasing atmospheric CO2 will be minor and net-beneficial to humanity and the environment.

Eighth, Earth is colder-than-optimum for humanity and the environment. More than 50,000 Excess Winter Deaths occurred in just England and Wales last winter – an Excess Winter Death rate almost three times the per-capita average in the USA. (d’Aleo and MacRae 2015)

Ninth, the continued false warming “adjustments” of the surface temperature record, the fraudulent Mann hockey stick embraced by the IPCC and the Climategate emails all prove the criminal intent of the leaders of the global warming/climate change scam.

Tenth, the IPCC and the leaders of the global warming movement have a perfectly negative predictive track record – every one of their very-scary predictions of runaway catastrophic global warming and more extreme weather have failed to materialize. The ability to correctly predict is the best objective measure of scientific competence, and the warmist cabal have a perfectly negative predictive track record, demonstrated negative competence, and negative personal credibility. Nobody should believe them or their alarmist nonsense..

Eleventh, we published with confidence in 2002 in a written debate with the Pembina Institute:
“Climate science does not support the theory of catastrophic human-made global warming – the alleged warming crisis does not exist.”

Twelfth, we also published with confidence in the same 2002 debate:
“The ultimate agenda of pro-Kyoto advocates is to eliminate fossil fuels, but this would result in a catastrophic shortfall in global energy supply – the wasteful, inefficient energy solutions proposed by Kyoto advocates simply cannot replace fossil fuels.”

Past decades of actual global observations adequately prove that these two statements are correct to date. Since then, many trillions of dollars and millions of lives have been wasted due to false global warming alarmism and green energy nonsense. Competent scientists and engineers have known these facts for decades.

No regret, win-win”
It looks like a Pascalian bet: not believing will provide regrets or nothing (=0.
However, this isn’t true.
It’s win-lose when allocating huge but still scare resources to insignificant policies at the cost of not addressing much more urgent and important issues. See the Copenhagen Consensus: https://www.copenhagenconsensus.com/
Then there will be regret, but much later than the “time in office” in parliaments, governments or NGO-boardrooms.

Dead right. But very few want to seriously consider this. We are dealing with people who are locked into ideological and religious-like beliefs, not people who are willing to participate in rational analysis and discussion.

I have now watched most of the hearing and have concluded that this committee needs to agree on a working definition for climate, climate change, and human caused climate change. Dr. Curry was the only one that seemed to have any grasp of these and the others continually cited weather events as changing climate with the implication that it is established fact that these were caused by human activity. How has this basic misunderstanding come about? My recommendation for any future hearings is to somehow establish good definitions at the very beginning.

Dr. Curry, the hearing you attended was not a session held to ascertain facts to assist in policy making. Instead it was the modern version of kabuki theater meant to reassure a particular political audience that “their” politician is looking out for their narrow interests.

I wonder how long it would take them to throw you out if every time someone conflated weather with climate you jumped up and shouted “YOU LIE.” Unless and until the lies are countered when and where they are said or published, the lies will continue.

Quite apart from 500,000 being the inflated product of someone’s else’s already mad climate propaganda. That will be repeated long after the cows come down from the hills. This particular northern catchment – where the flooding is shown in light blue below – will soon be an ocean of wildflowers. Nearby farmers are already replanting and restocking.

Is the certain fact that things were much wetter before the modern era.

“This suggests that at least here, in this relatively confined valley, sediment delivery to the Great Barrier Reef may be relatively low compared to other periods over the past millennium and this may be due to low levels of tropical cyclone activity over the past 200 years.” https://researchonline.jcu.edu.au/42318/

100’s of thousands is the assessment of somebody in the cattle business with an operation by Cloncurry. And I’ve been there. Also have seen aerial photographs of carcasses outside of Mt. Ada, and I’ve been there as well. On a cattle trip.

300,000 to 500,000 head of cattle lost in a regional weather event, in a region where cattle numbers were already down considerably because of a prolonged drought, is an unprecedented number. It’s gigantic. The biggest number listed in the 1920’s record is 3,000 head. Unless somebody finds a better reference, that’s 297,000 to 497,000 head short, which could get a cowboy hung.

And, as usual here, half the history is presented as proof. Maybe, maybe not.

In 1920 there were some 6.4 million beef cattle (the predominant industry)and 500,000 dairy animals in Queensland which peaked at 7 million the following year but slid to 5 million by 1925. There seemed to be a constant diet of droughts and floods in the period. Some of the losses are recorded as ‘very heavy’. but who knows what that equates to

Over the last couple of years there has been a consistent 11 million beef cattle and around 1.2 million dairy.in Queensland . In the 1970’s the numbers were half this but the herd almost doubled in size between 1990 to 1995 to similar levels to today which accompanied almost a doubling in the number of establishments involved in beef cattle

we must bear in mind that there may be an unfortunate juxtaposition of large herds just where the flooding hit, whereas at another time equally severe floods may hit an area where cattle are smaller in number.

Trying to fit a doubling of cattle may mean some were being grazed in areas at higher risk than when the numbers were much smaller.

As you can guess, its a miserable damp drizzly day today with no incentive to go outside…..

For some reason this has been held in moderation for 5 or 6 hours so I have changed some of the words and will try again

In 1920 there were some 6.4 million beef cattle and 500,000 dairy animals in Queensland which peaked at 7 million the following year but slid to 5 million by 1925. There seemed to be a constant diet of droughts and floods in the period. Some of the losses are recorded as ‘very heavy’. but who knows what that equates to

Over the last couple of years there has been some 11 million beef and around 1.2 million dairy.in Queensland . In the 1970’s the numbers were half this but the herd almost doubled in size between 1990 to 1995 to similar levels to today.

There may be an unfortunate juxtaposition of large herds just where the flooding hit, whereas at another time equally severe floods may hit an area where cattle are smaller in number. However, doubling the cattle numbers may mean some were being grazed in areas at higher risk than when the numbers were much smaller in the 1920’s.

They “grasp” the terms just fine. They have redefined them.
A wag posted last summer “I’m looking forward to the winter, when the weather is just weather for a few months and not the result of my truck.”

The BBC news at 10 is on and I just heard a talking head claim that climate change and human actions could drive all the world’s insects to extinction within a century. Even cockroaches gone – within the lifetime of a baby born today.

The media have been cultivated as a useful attack dog of the climate movement but it is now out of control, and the message has entered the territory of pseudoscientific nonsense. With embarrassing clarity.

Alarmists abound, but the meta-analysis of the 73 reports they reviewed seems to distinguish between causation and correlation. Do you think the peer review process resulting in their publishing the study is broken in this case?

The beginning: “People keep asking what the Green New Deal will cost, but that is the wrong question. The question is how much do they want? It turns out the New Dealers are pretty clear about the answer ­ around $100 trillion over ten years. They are working to a very big budget. What gets done depends on the money, not vice versa.

Representative Ocasio-Cortez (who has a degree in economics) and her crew have a clear idea of where the money for the Green New Deal is going to come from and roughly how much they want. As with WW2, the Green New Deal will simply consume about half of American GDP. I am not making this up. That WW2 was a time of great sacrifice and hardship, as a direct result of this dramatic mobilization, does not matter to these folks. War is war, right?

Here it is in its clearest form: “The resolution describes the 10-year plan to transform every sector of our economy to remove GHH and pollution. It says it does this through huge investment in renewables at WW2 scale (which was 40-60% GDP investments).” This recent quote is from Representative Ocasio-Cortez’s chief of staff ­ Saikat Chakrabarti.

If you start with a budget of 40-60% of US GDP you can think really big, and the Green New Dealers have done just that. GDP is running around $20 trillion a year, or $200 trillion in ten years. Taking 40-60% of that is $80-120 trillion, so let’s call it an even $100 trillion to finance the Green New Deal dream.

The ways and means of raising this stupendous sum of $100 trillion are also clear in their minds. It will be done the same way WW2 was done, however that was. It is obvious to them that we can do this, because we have done it before. The specifics do not matter to the Plan. The Government can work them out.”

There is a lot more in the article.

Let’s ask the 70+ House and Senate co-sponsors of the Green New Deal Resolution if they endorse this $100 trillion goal. I bet not, for most of them.

Using GDP as a basis for a source of this pipe dream vastly overstates what is available for the New Green Deal. GDP is made up of Personal Consumption, Business Investment, Government Expenditures and Net Exports. A more appropriate way to use the golden goose is to look at the actual Tax Base. Americans Gross Income and the basis for Income Taxes is ~$10.6 Trillion. (The last Report from IRS is actually for 2016 and was $10.226 Trillion, a 0.16% increase over 2015. Whoopee!)
The estimated aggregate Corporate Net Income is $2 Trillion. So the source of taxation is really ballpark $12 Trillion.
The Federal Government now spends $4.4 Trillion. State and Local Government spends $2 Trillion.
AOC’s other Freebies Extravaganza costs were $4 Trillion, of which there probably is some overlap with the Green New Deal.
Regardless, there is just so much to tax and the amount available to tax is much lower than the GDP.
If we are lucky, the adults will eventually show up. They probably will but only after they hem and haw about their faux support to mollify the economic illiterates in the Democratic Party, of which there are many.

Or as AOC purportedly said “If money doesn’t grow on trees, why do banks have branches?”

Green New Deal $100 trillion goal? Based on what? BOM Acorn 1 and 2 adjustments cooling the past, (those 1910 > thermometer readings from Stevenson screens in low population towns,) and warming the present, (those 1950> thermometer readings in densely populated heat island cities to increase temperatures over time.) Serfs think that with trillions spent on global warming programs, you’d want to know that the data is reliable, that the data warrants the punitive costs. But it don’t. Bureau of Meteorology fiddling with data behind the scenes shows that it don’t.

And there’s UN Christine Figures, advocate of a new globalist economic order admitting that the global warming campaign is not really about climate change, it’s about political change. And there’s an added political factor involving government bureaucracy involvement in the ‘science’ and that’s to do with climate modelling.

Professor Lindzen, 2008, ‘Climate Science : is it Currently Designed to Answer Questions?’ Professor Lindzen describes why it isn’t, and attributes the reason to a change to a new alarm incentive paradigm after WW2 where by big spending simulation and government funded programs have replaced theory and observation to the detriment of the science.

Professor Judith Curry, 2016, ‘Climate Models for Lawyers,’ observes: ‘There are literally thousands of different choices made in the construction of a climate model (e.g. resolution, complexity of the sub-models, parameterizations, ) Each different set of choices produces a different model having different sensitivities,’… ‘And arguably the most fundamental challenge for climate models lies in the coupling of two chaotic fluids, the ocean and the atmosphere.’

Professor Curry concludes that given the above and given the failure of climate models to explain the observed early 20th century warming and mid-century cooling, the climate models are not fit for the purpose of simulating and predicting the evolution of Earth’s climate.

So much documented error in climate science methodology and BOM measurement of data, so much false alarm propagated by MSM, so much cost $$$$$,$$$,$$$,$$$,$$$ to western economies from guvuhmint climate policies, and like lambs to the slaughter or lemmings over the cliff, we still take no effective action to end the corruption of our institutions and decline of our western affluent civilization.

If you are suggesting that I am dismissive of the disaster many 1000’s of people experienced you are very mistaken. I’m rejecting ridiculous and unfounded claims from motivated alarmists. Many of these cattlemen would agree.

To keep animals thriving in cold winters you have to keep them well fed and watered. In Mongolia they have too many animals versus their ability to keep them eating in harsh cold. Their infrastructure is not as developed as it is in the United States and Australia, where mass die offs are rare.

A large mass die off of cattle in the Dakotas due to extreme cold would be rare. Personally, have never heard of it. In the 1970’s we experienced conditions worse that the polar vortex.

They did have a recent mass die off in western South Dakota due to an unusually heavy, wet snow event. Wasn’t that cold. Cattle do not do well in stressful conditions. They die with surprising ease when stressed, which what is probably behind a fair percentage of the deaths in Queensland. A flood is stressful. Being hungry is stressful.

I started with number that was used repeatedly in the Australian press articles that were extensively quoting Queensland cattlemen.

500,000 cattle killed by the flood. A humanitarian disaster. If only it had not flooded they could have lived forever!
Or not?
The good/bad thing is that Queensland has been through 5 years of drought on top of a previous possible 11 years of drought.
So cattle numbers had been a lot less for a long time.
Feast or famine? Will only take 2 years to entirely restock and then we can eat another 500,000 Queensland cattle a year every year or at least until the next natural drought or flood I guess.
While very sad on a suffering viewpoint it is just another part of the cruel cycle of life. 11.3 million cattle in Qld I read, most destined to our plates.

Possibly. Though, I think some of the same attributes are present in bison. The point is, they did not necessarily have to drown. Little or no food for days, weight loss, exhausted from mucking around in the mud, big temperature drop, bunched up against a fence, they can quickly arrive at death’s door. I don’t think it’s cold enough there to actually freeze them to death, though that description is in the press there. They have not gone without food long enough to be starving to death. It’s a stress death.

It is tropical savanna country where rainfall is the result of the lows forming over the Coral Sea in summer. The silver lining of recent flooding is good seasons to come and recharge of aquifers including the Great Artesian Basin.

JCH | February 13, 2019 at 8:44 am |
“Possibly. Though, I think some of the same attributes are present in bison. The point is, they did not necessarily have to drown.”
Really JCH.
perhaps they could have just swum 36 miles to safety?
-\
CNN) A river has gone from thin and dry to 37 miles (60 kilometers) wide in a matter of weeks as a result of floods in northeast Australia, satellite imagery shows.

“I love a sunburnt country,
A land of sweeping plains
Of ragged mountain ranges
Of droughts and flooding rains.
I love her far horizons
I love her jewel-sea,
Her beauty and her terror –
The wide brown land for me!”
Dorothy MacKellar

This is Australia. If there is a point other than dead cows – get on with it.

Devastating flooding in Queensland’s northwest is feared to have killed about 500,000 cattle and left farmers with estimated costs of $5 billion – but most is not covered by insurance.

The Cattle Council of Australia says the full extent of losses is difficult to calculate, but feedback from affected properties suggests more than 500,000 animals have died.

“Overall costs associated with on-property losses, including livestock and infrastructure, are estimated at $5 billion,” a spokesman told insuranceNEWS.com.au.

“Some 800 properties have been affected over 13.25 million hectares – an area twice the size of Tasmania. Due to prohibitive insurance costs, it is not common for producers to have commercial breeding herds covered for losses arising from floods.” …

Again – even if these guesses and it seems a bit opportunistic of insurers to be marketing additional coverage – are even close to reality it is still not relevant to climate extremes. I take it that was your original point?

“Every single catastrophic scenario considered by the IPCC AR5 (WGII, Table 12.4) has a rating of very unlikely or exceptionally unlikely and/or has low confidence. The only tipping point that the IPCC considers likely in the 21st century is disappearance of Arctic summer sea ice (which is fairly reversible, since sea ice freezes every winter).”

“In summary, although there is independent evidence for decadal changes in TOA radiative fluxes over the last two decades, the evidence is equivocal. Changes in the planetary and tropical TOA radiative fluxes are consistent with independent global ocean heat-storage data, and are expected to be dominated by changes in cloud radiative forcing. To the extent that they are real, they may simply reflect natural low-frequency variability of the climate system.” IPCC TAR 3.4.4.1

Discussions of surface temperature variability cannot be informative without integrating into consideration ocean heat and top of atmosphere radiative flux data.

Near the end of one of Scott Adams’ daily Periscope podcasts, he mentions his desire to moderate a debate between mainstream climate scientists and the climate science skeptics concerning the existence and dangers of climate change.

As Scott Adams would manage it, the debaters would not be facing each other in the same venue. Rather, they would be asked in a Periscope interview to present their five most persuasive arguments for their position.

As I myself view Adam’s proposal, his podcasted debate might serve as a dry run for a larger public debate over today’s mainstream climate science, a debate which might go critical mass if America’s voters are ever asked to make serious personal and economic sacrifices in the name of fighting climate change.

Among his other pursuits, Scott Adams is an expert in the art and science of persuasion. He is looking for a short list of arguments from each side of the AGW question that would be persuasive to those people who are not climate scientists themselves but who have an interest in hearing summaries of the opposing arguments.

It is clear from listening to Adam’s thoughts on his proposed debate that he does not have a grasp of the most basic fundamentals of each side of the question. Nor does he understand how those basic fundamentals influence the content and rhetoric of the science debate. Anyone who participated in this debate would have to educate Scott Adams on the basics in a way that is comprehensible to the layman.

The other problem for those representing the skeptical position is that Adams views the question as having only two very distinct sides. He does not understand that a middle position exists which covers the many uncertainties of today’s climate science.

In his look at how the scientific debate is being pursued by both sides, Scott Adams frames the science question in a stark terms. Is the earth warming, or is not warming? If it is warming, is CO2 the cause, or is it not the cause? Is warming dangerous, or is it not dangerous? If it is dangerous, then how dangerous is it?

Judith Curry’s name was mentioned as a climate scientist who might be a good representative for the skeptic side of the debate.

Presumably, in addition to presenting their side of the question, each representative would be asked to refute the five most persuasive arguments offered by the opposition. I would suggest that these arguments might cover some or all of these topics:

— The fundamental basis of today’s mainstream climate science including the postulated water vapor feedback mechanism.

— Ocean warming versus atmospheric warming as the true measure of the presence and the rate of increase of climate change.

— The accuracy, validity, and uncertainties of the modern temperature record and of the paleoclimate temperature record.

— The accuracy, validity, and uncertainties of the general circulation models, the sea level rise projections, and the projections of AGW-related environmental, human, and economic impacts.

— The costs and benefits of alternative public policy responses to climate change including the practicality of relying on wind and solar for our energy needs, and the future role of nuclear power,

— The costs and benefits of massive government spending on Green New Deal programs versus the use of government-mandated carbon pricing mechanisms combined with an aggressive application of the Clean Air Act.

If Scott Adams goes forward with his podcasted debate, will anyone show up to defend the mainstream climate science side of the question?

If no one does, then someone from the skeptic side must present the mainstream’s side in a way that is both true to the mainstream position but which also drastically condenses the raw science into something the layman can understand.

Here is an example of just how condensed a basic description of today’s mainstream climate science might have to be in order to be comprehensible to the laymen — and also to Scott Adams himself — as a description of today’s mainstream theory:

Over time periods covering the last 10,000 years of the earth’s temperature history, carbon dioxide has been the earth’s primary temperature control knob.

Although water vapor is the earth’s primary greenhouse gas, adding carbon dioxide further warms the atmosphere thus allowing it to hold more water vapor than it otherwise could. The additional carbon dioxide amplifies the total warming effect of both gases, CO2 and water vapor, through a feedback mechanism operating between CO2’s warming effects and water vapor’s warming effects.

For example, if carbon dioxide’s pre-industrial concentration of 280 ppm is doubled to 560 ppm by adding more CO2 to the atmosphere, CO2’s basic effect of a 1C to 1.5C warming per CO2 doubling is amplified by the water vapor feedback mechanism into a much larger 2.5C to 4C range of total warming.

Atmospheric and ocean circulation mechanisms affect the rate and extent of atmospheric and ocean warming. These mechanisms transport heat within the atmosphere and the oceans, and move heat between the atmosphere and the oceans. These circulation mechanisms also affect how much of the additional trapped heat is being stored in the oceans, how much heat is being stored in the atmosphere, and how much heat is being lost to outer space.

Uncertainties in our basic knowledge of atmospheric and ocean circulation mechanisms make it difficult to predict with exact precision how much warming will occur if CO2 concentration is doubled from 280 ppm to 560 ppm.

These uncertainties also limit our ability to predict exactly how fast the warming will occur and to predict with exact certainty where and how much of the additional trapped heat will be stored in the oceans versus in the atmosphere. Thus a range of warming predictions can be expected and must be studied further.

Depending upon which assumptions are being made concerning how atmospheric and ocean circulation mechanisms work, and concerning how much CO2 will be added to the atmosphere over the next one-hundred years, climate modeling exercises now indicate that a range of from 2.5C to 4C of total global warming over and above pre-industrial temperatures is likely to occur before the year 2100.

(End of Summarized Theory, CO2 as Control Knob)

– – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –

As a layman in trying to understand climate science topics, you have to crawl before you can walk.

If the skeptic’s arguments are to be persuasive to the non-scientist layman, then explaining the basics of today’s mainstream climate science is a necessary step prior to explaining the uncertainties of the science and its predictions. It’s even a necessary prior step if one completely rejects the basic tenants of today’s mainstream climate science. An informed debate has to start somewhere.

As someone who is not a climate scientist myself, the description I’ve written above is my own highly condensed summary of what I understand to be the mainstream climate scientist’s basic theory. The description is presented in terms that might be understandable to the non-scientist layman while also being true to the basic tenants of the mainstream climate science narrative.

Is my example of a highly summarized description actually understandable to the non-scientist layman? Is it actually true to the scientific position mainstream climate scientists now hold? Is it useful as a starting point for understanding the overall context of the debate?

Here is a most important point concerning what Scott Adams is trying to accomplish.

Adams is not asking the opposing sides to prove scientifically that their side of the climate change question is the scientific truth. He is asking them to offer a defense of their side of the question that is understandable to the non-scientist and is persuasive as debating arguments go.

In his look at how the scientific debate is being pursued by both sides, Scott Adams frames the science question in stark terms. Is the earth warming, or is not warming? If it is warming, is the cause CO2, or is it not CO2? Is the warming dangerous, or is it not dangerous? If it is dangerous, how dangerous is it?

Logically, any level of warming regardless of its rate of increase could become dangerous if the warming continues indefinitely into the future. A 0.2C per decade rate of warming will produce a 2C increase in a hundred years time, 4C in two-hundred years time. If we continue adding CO2 to the atmosphere, and if CO2 will indeed be the earth’s temperature control knob for the next several thousand years, then when will the warming stop?

What is left out of the current debate over climate change is the question of certainty versus uncertainty.

If America’s voting public is ever asked to make serious personal and economic sacrifices in the name of fighting climate change, and if the debate over today’s mainstream climate science then goes critical mass, the question of certainty versus uncertainty will become a deciding factor as to who wins or loses that debate.

Summarizing mainstream climate science theory in a way that is understandable to the layman; that is short enough to keep the layman’s attention without causing their eyes to glaze over; and that is true to the basic tenants of the mainstream theory is a tough nut to crack.

The practical reality here is that mainstream climate scientists now own the ground on which the scientific debate must take place. Anyone on the skeptic side who doesn’t recognize the reality of the situation will lose the debate by default.

What if no one from the mainstream side shows up? Moreover, what if someone shows up but there isn’t common agreement among the mainstream scientist, the skeptic scientist, and the debate’s moderator as to what mainstream climate theory actually states?

If there is no opponent, there is no debate. Moreover, if the opponents show up but there is no common understanding of the theory behind mainstream climate science, then the debaters will be talking past each other and the moderator will not be able to keep the debate on track.

In any case, if no one from the mainstream side with stature and credentials shows up, then one of the skeptic scientists must put on a mainstream climate scientist’s hat and defend the mainstream position with as much clarity, ardor, and determination as the mainstreamers would do themselves.

Once again, it is important to understand that Scott Adams isn’t trying to determine the scientific truth of climate change and of global warming.

He wants to moderate an informed debate between the mainstream scientists and the skeptic scientists, and to do this in a way which is understandable to the layman and which uses the most persuasive arguments each side can muster.

Dr. Curry I hope you will continue your work as one of the few rational voice in this generally irrational global debate. Someone asked me recently if you are a “denialist” … I answered: “No, she is a scientist.”